Tēnā koutou katoa,
This isn't a competition. The wide range of poems that I've considered in 2025 seems less a playing field than a landscape, its distinctive topography as various in all its parts and salient points as our familiar landscape of Aotearoa. Poets aren't team players or tourists; they produce work that is unique, the yield of individual, intelligent minds using the resources of poetry and language to the best of their ability.
In my selection of the 'best' New Zealand poems of 2025 I’m putting forward my personal view, from way up here in the south of Te Waipounamu, of the landscape I've seen and the parts of it that I can personally recommend. These are poems which I consider durable. They are exceptionally well written, vivid and insightful in their imagery. They have stood up to multiple readings and continue to fascinate me in their variety, depth and beauty.
During the year as poems flooded in, an idiosyncratic process of triage continued. After at least four readings of each of a few thousand poems I placed them in piles on my table: 'definite', 'possible' and 'probably not'. These piles expanded and contracted. The middle pile was usually the largest, the 'definite' the smallest. By the end of the year I had a working long list of a couple of hundred. From this, in time, I drew a hundred and fifty, then a hundred, then fifty. It was a hard job finding the last twenty-five. However, reading and re-reading, I began to discern some links (clear or obscure) between certain poems, some resonance drawing these into a (possible) track over this country. Here's my overview, not entirely whimsical:
It begins in the earth.
As she digs 'for another forked-up feed', Rhian Gallagher harvests from ancestral roots 'a memory/ I didn’t know was mine'.
Nafanua Purcell Kersel's sensual and sensitive language holds 'a fire/ lit to activate the breath/ of life by pressing close'.
Whaitiri Tua-Warbrick understands the power of lightning as 'a love playing out across the globe'.
David Eggleton travels from 'the time of A'a, te atua, the gods' of indigenous Pacific beginnings into the present day, where 'we stand on our island,/ chest-deep in the ocean, as the levels keep rising.'
Bob Orr brings heroes of the past to the coast of Aotearoa with Kupe's waka 'flying in through the surf' to a holiday beach.
Grieving, Tusiata Avia experiences with clarity the presence of her dead father 'in his dark-blue suit jacket/ with his freezing-worker shoulders/ square as Gary Cooper's'.
Robert Sullivan's bone flute sings to the birds of Waitati and brings the toroa back to life, 'a downy chick sitting/ on the high, sea-facing head of Pukekura'.
Bill Manhire speaks of bleak finality and the death of memory and mind. The short poem 'Gaza' is much larger than it looks.
Mauatua Fa'ara-Reynolds tells how the settling of ink into tapa marks it with meaning: 'the ink blot will sink into the bleached ghost of tree fibres,/ spread like roots and remind us: all things must settle/ into themselves'.
Ariana Tikao adds to heartfelt lyric the words of a historic lament, in memory of the honour-suicide of an ancestor.
In three southern locations, Jackson McCarthy traverses his own interior landscape. 'We drive in the valley; these cliff faces show me/ my own'.
Kate Camp 'personally walked away from hope some years ago' but is nevertheless working out her own philosophy. 'The source of your power/ and your nemesis/ are gonna be the same thing right// you don’t have to pay someone/ to tell you that'.
Erik Kennedy's inner musing has a spoken immediacy as his thoughts swerve from Zen to 'an invisible border/and you meet new people who invite you to their lunch', to corvid intelligence, to 'a quiet struggle for power' at day's end.
The voice of Jac Jenkins is loud in the many ways of slam: 'show you someone who's slamming a mic/ with their mouth', 'slamming us with their short-shorted body parts/ and badass hair', 'slamming/ their eyes into ours' until 'you slam me into a wall'.
Richard Reeve hears the calm menacing voice of absolute power: 'Sorry we forgot to tell you about that./ Sorry we forgot to fill you in on the plan'. 'That was always just how we do things, kiddo'.
A sense of foreboding lingers in Jenny Bornholdt's quiet words, where Mr Boltanski's heart 'fills our ears with a noise/ like fear'.
Victor Billot, who understood early that 'bullshit could be turned/ To shield and sword out in the world' is an Everyman, getting on with a hard-edged life.
Alex Stone has found a simple and gratifying way to deal with bad news.
Michael Steven's memory of the last time he saw his father happy is one of peace and poetry, 'and it was enough'.
On a bridge in Amsterdam, Chris Tse is sensitive to new possibilities: 'I’m rewiring myself in this new city—/ one that doesn't judge/ what you wish for selfishly'.
Ruben Mita's thoughts are caught in eight delicate stanzas, 'Trying to look/ into the night/ I become inseparably/ tangled with/ my own reflection'.
Felix Bornholdt's focussed mind doesn't waste words 'in the very room where/ the sentence lived/ quietly, third drawer/ down, fourth cabinet/ from the door'.
Elizabeth Smither interacts with her cat and Wittgenstein. 'Pshaw! Has he not heard of transference:/ philosopher to philosophy to imbiber'.
At the Book Awards, Nick Ascroft warns of the literary consequences of all this poetry.
The end of this path finds Jan Kemp among the angels.
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Thank you, Ōrongohau and all the poets. It's been a privilege to read the minds of Aotearoa 2025.
Cilla McQueen
Motupōhue