New Zealand > NZ Poetry

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 poems selected by antholigist Paula Green for this gorgeous clection reveal adult love - from the sparks of youth to the changing nature of love in old age - but she has also included examples of the love of off... read more

With its recorded beginnings at the Globe Tavern in 1980, Poetry Live has been a gathering point for poets in Auckland for decades. This anthology collects work by the poets who read at Poetry Live in 2010.
Contributors include Albert Wendt, Anne Kennedy, David Finnegan (Aus), Heather McPherson, Iain Britton, Ila Selwyn, Jason Morales, Kevin Ireland, Michael Botur, Michael Morrissey, Renee Liang, Ross Brighton, Siobhan Harvey, Vincent O'Sullivan, Vivienne Plumb, Penny Somer... read more

Includes 14 poems by well known New Zealand poets.
Includes Allen Curnow, sam Hunt, Vincent O'Sullivan, Bill Manhire, Fiona Farrell, Charles Brasch, Jo Randerson, ARD Fairburn and Kateherine Mansfield.

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 narrative, these poems are untitled and mostly short, charting time passing and seasons turning by procedures done, books read, appointments made, food cooked and dreams dreamed. The language used ... read more

'A poem is a ripple of words on water wind-huffed'. Hone Tuwhare, one of this country's best-loved poets, died in 2008. He was New Zealand's second Te Mata Poet Laureate and in 2003 was among ten of New Zealand's greatest living artists named as Arts Foundation of NZ Icon Artists. His rhythmic voice ranged from playful, earthy, wry and cheeky to protesting and angry, to loving and elegiac. Delighting in the everyday, he had an acute eye for detail and a deep love of the land. He evoked Maori myth and waiata, but also embraced the ... read more

This collection is a journey so there are poems about growing up in Winnipeg, Canada as well as growing in to New Zealand.
a rope
 
yanks me home
step off the plane
Aotearoa grasps an ankle
my soul down under
 ...
                I seek the sun
south at Tutukaka
drive north to the snows of Ruapehu
the logic is clear
 
 
my north leads to your south
... read more

This is a collection of writings and performances from Daren Kamali. Drawing on the underwater world in relation to his life he fuses sea creatures, myths and themes from around the Pacific with the written word, and visual and audio mediums to produce his creative writing.
In English and Fijian.

The wonder is in rising, friendNot oncebut repeatedly
The wonder is in rising
Some of the poems in ths collection have appeared in NZ Monthly Review, Rambling Jack, Arms Linked: Womens Against the Tour and Laingholm Roundabout.

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Fast Talking PI is the first 'singular, confident and musical' collection of poetry by Auckland writer Selina Tusitala Marsh. 'Tusitala' means writer of tales in Samoan, and Marsh here lives up to her name with stories of her life, her family, community, ancestry, and history. Her poetry is sensuous and strong, using lush imagery, clear rhythms and repetitions to power it forward. The list poem is a favourite style, but she also writes with a Pacific lyricism entirely her own. Fast Talking PI is structured in three sections, 'Tusit... 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-reaching chapters from Paula Green and Harry Ricketts on such elements as form, context, features, effects and identity, this is a lively and accessible introduction to New Zealand poetry. Pack... read more

Awarded Gold in the Books category of the 2010 Pride in Print Awards. An aloe - spiky, soothing, fragrant, bitter - opens Diana Bridge's new collection of poetry. Aloe is structured in four parts: 'The compulsion to catch it', 'Into words', 'Among the Freuds' and 'It's their century'. The first section looks outwards to the natural world, opening with a stunning set of tree poems that begin with close observation and move on to contemplate loss, hesitancy, generation and repetition (repeat, diversify, diversify, repeat). The second... read more

New Zealand Society of Authors Jessie McKay Best First Book Award for Poetry Winner A first collection of poetry by Auckland poet Sam Sampson. Sampson has an ear for the lilting phrase, and his poems have a gentle ebb and flow, which is often echoed visually by the way the poems are laid out upon the page. Though experimental in form, Sampson's poems are also grounded in his environment, often the West Coast of Auckland where he grew up. Karekare, the Manukau Harbour and the Waitakere Ranges all feature, but in poems that reach ... read more

This intelligent, moving collection taps into the extraordinarily powerful way New Zealand poets address the subject of death, dying and grief. There are 65 poems from poets as diverse as Janet Frame and Glen Colquhoun, James K Baxter and Michael Jackson, drawn together by one of this country's finest mid-career poets, Andrew Johnston. All royalties go to Hospice New Zealand and the book is being launched on Montana Poetry Day 2008 at the Mary Potter Hospice, Wellington. This charitable connection was the editor's plan, as a mark o... 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 her child. With tough, deft attention to language and its emotional power, Sarah Broom asks us to consider our relationships with the world and with words. Tigers at Awhitu is a first, compelling and rich, poet... read more

In Crumple, Vivienne Plumb takes us on a series of journeys, both geographic and metaphoric. These poems have itchy feet, wandering from Poland, to China, through Italy, Australia and home to New Zealand. But is New Zealand home, or where in New Zealand is home?

Siobhan Harvey is the editor of Words Chosen Carefully: New Zealand Writers in Discussion and Our Own Kind: 100 New Zealand Poems about Animals. Her poetry and prose have appeared in many New Zealand and international magazines and anthologies, and have been broadcast on Radio New Zealand.

A collection of poetry.

Gregory O'Brien's first collection of poems since Afternoon of an Evening Train (2005), Beauties of the Octagonal Pool is centred on the 'octagonal pool' of the Waitemata Harbour. In an eight-armed embrace, Beauties of the Octagonal Pool collects poems written from and out of a variety of times, locations and experiences, from the water-frontages of Fiji, Fiordland and the Mediterranean to the built history of Moscow and Berlin. Gregory O'Brien's poems here - his first collection for seven years - have a thoughtful musicality, a sh... read more

In the seven long-ish poems of her new collection, multi-talented writer Anne Kennedy explores past and present, here and there, north and south, earth and paradise, hello and goodbye. In unfolding couplets, 'The Darling North' engages with a woman's past, her lover, her new landscapes, exploring the results of yearning and directional possibilities on the shores of the Hokianga. F. E. Maning and Seamus Heaney hover in the background as touchstones. 'Hands On' reconfigures the stories of Little Red Riding Hood, Three Little Pigs an... read more