New Zealand > NZ Poetry

A wind that only the widest gardens can hold. A lipstick stain on a poem. A bee released - with recourse to a letter from the Inland Revenue Department. A grey sky like a governess, a mother dressed by her two-year-old son, a flurry of leaves behind a tram. In The Blue Coat, Elizabeth Smither examines the quotidian and the qu... read more

This book celebrates the richness and variety of New Zealand poetry by outlining many of the numerous ways to read - and write - poems. It offers 80 key poems that showcase different aspects of the genre, as well as commentary from 25 poets about what inspired them to write specific works. With insightful and wide-reachin... read more

Brown Girls in Bright Red Lipstick is a collection of poetry by Courtney Sina Meredith. Meredith has established a local and international reputation as a performer, poet, musician and playwright. Her work is an on-going discussion of contemporary urban life with an underlying Pacific politique and an educated, politically aw... read more

I think I have the moment in me that I want to last like the instant the light catches the hills to make them sharp. (from 'Sunday Afternoon') Philosophers, scientists and artists such as Socrates, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Einstein and Jane Austen pop in for lunch, stay for the afternoon, dance at outdoor concerts and gene... read more

From his green enclave and ‘avid for copy’, this poet is singing still – but also considering the acceptance of silence. C. K. Stead has always swum through literature, cultures, surroundings both physical and social, with a deft stroke. Completed in his eightieth year, The Yellow Buoy sees the poet firmly a... read more

In these poems characters appear in the landscape, situated, as in a story. They rage against it, consider it, interact with it, abandon themselves to it. A family walks north along a frozen road; a fugitive crouches in the long grass of a field; a woman driving around the harbour's edge points out the red sail of a yacht to ... read more

Through Slip Stream, Paula Green is interested in how to balance a challenging experience against the continuation of everyday life, and proposes small distractions and coping strategies solving cryptic crossword puzzles, for example, the mock-clues of which are scattered through the poems. Making up a fluid, intensely felt... read more

Love - that complicated, delicious, pleasurable, necessary feeling ties us to another human, to a mother, father, son, daughter, sibling, lover or friend. Love can also tie us to a place, an experience, an object. We love and we are loved; unexpectedly, gloriously, painfully, deeply. The majority of the 150 New Zealand love p... read more

Fleur Adcock's title refers to the transparent, glittering wings of some of the species - bees, mosquitoes, dragonflies - celebrated or lamented in a sequence of poems on encounters with arthropods, from the stick insects and crayfish of her native New Zealand to the clothes' moths that infest her London house. There is an el... read more

This volume makes possible a proper assessment of the scope and stature of Peter Bland's workl.  These poems - often witty and beautiful - are a lifetime's achievement, a testament to an ongoing power to engage us in his vision.
 
Peter Bland arrived in New Zealand in 1954  and since the 1970's has ... read more

Winner of the Montana 2008 Poetry Award. This immensely readable collection is among the most accessible well loved poet Janet Charman has written. Her poems always emerge out of ordinary daily experience, the life with which her readers are only too familiar. By illuminating this world she broadens perceptions and understand... read more

It's been 35 years since Dame Fiona Kidman's first book - of poems - was published, and now she is back with another, perfectly timed for her 70th birthday in March 2010. There has been renewed interest in her poetry since the recent publication of her memoirs, and this exquisitely packaged collection will not disappoint. Ran... read more

Briefcase, the first book of poems by District Court Judge John Adams, is a collection presented as a briefcase of lost documents and poems, allowing the author to play with a wide range of stylistic ideas around a central narrative theme, producing a melange of poems - in traditional and experimental forms - and other texts:... read more

To graft something is to fix two things together like tree branches or skin to heal or grow something new. The word graft originates from the Old Norse groftr, meaning to dig, and is also linked with the verb grave, an ancient Germanic one also meaning to dig. The poems in Graft attempt to bring things together - ideas and cu... read more

‘i’m quite alone when i hear my name called in Mum’s voice as if she wants me back at once’
 
If ‘mother won’t come to us’, New Zealanders must go to mother . . . Here an expat poet finds herself in alien yet strangely familiar territory, a place her ancestors &lsq... read more

Singing with Both Throats is the first poetry collection for Maris O'Rourke.
Singing with Both Throats is an analogy for the way O'Rourke lives her life; the many roles she plays, and has played; the wide range of work and activities she has been involved in and still participates in; the varied 'voices' she has used, a... read more

'You have to start somewhere / in these morose times' begins the title sequence of this collection, in which the dual, duelling lifeguards of east and west, sunrise and sunset, glib Narcissus and one-eyed Polyphemus, watch over a collection that explores the contradictions between life's pool-side surfaces and frightening und... read more

These poems were written in Berlin while Kate Camp held the Creative New Zealand Berlin Residency between September 2011 and October 2012.

LORNA STAVELEY ANKER was born in 1914. She used to joke that this was the cause of the First World War. In truth, the poems in this fine collection reveal her as New Zealand’s first woman war poet. There are poems here that arise from her childhood memories of Kaiser Bill. Three of her uncles died in France. She was a &... read more