'Poetry,' wrote the Greymouth poet Peter Hooper in 1969, 'isn't in my words, it's in the direction I'm pointing. If you can understand that and if you're appalled by the journey, stick to the guided tours. They issue return tickets.' Well, inevitably, this anthology is my guided tour, but it is also a gathering of poems pointing in a myriad of directions.

The very title of this anthology invites the notion of failure — or frustration at least. How to choose a token sample from the diverse and teeming catalogue of poems published last year. In the end it must become, at most, a simplified cross-section of memorable achievement. Read the full introduction >