David Eggleton

James K. Baxter: The selected poems edited by John Weir (Te Herenga Waka University Press, Cold Hub Press, 2023), 332pp, $40; Travels in Eclectia by Andrew M. Bell (Bigger Than Ben Hur Productions, 2020), 332pp, $56; From the Fringe of Heaven: Titirangi Poets edited by Piers Davies, Ron Riddell, Amanda Eason and Gretchen Carroll (Printable Reality, 2022); Famdamily: Meow Gurrrls (The Meow Gurrrls Collective, 2023), 40pp, $15; My Thoughts Are All of Swimming by Rose Collins (Sudden Valley Press, 2022), 100pp, $25; te pāhikahikatanga / incommensurability by Vaughan Rapatahana (Flying Island Books, 2023), 134pp, $10; Marcellus Wallace’s Dirty Laundry by David Beach (David Beach, 2021), 64pp, $25

Poets, in making poems, long to use words so as to explain, to expatiate, to justify and absolve our human predicament. None more so than James K. Baxter, who, as this new Selected Poems attests, remains one of the most able practitioners of poetry that New Zealand has produced. He’s also one of its most articulate and prolific writers, as the ten volumes of his Collected Works: Poems, Prose, Letters, published over the past ten years by Te Herenga Waka University Press and also edited by John Weir, attest (there are other works, such as plays, remaining to be added to this assemblage). In his memoir, Out of the Jaws of Wesley, Peter Olds records Baxter telling him: ‘They’ll etch on my tomb—at last, his mouth is mute.’ [Read more…]