One day you will be asked to select the 25 best New Zealand poems of the year and you will write the exact introduction I am writing now, which those before me likewise dutifully typed up. You'll mention the heft of the task, a fire hose of poems you have pushed your eyeballs into the blast of. You'll say it has nevertheless been a profound pleasure. You'll praise. You'll apologise. You will tiptoe around your subjectivity and the knottiness of bestness. It has to be said that certain writers you think excellent published nothing in the year in question, such as Tusiata Avia and Ashleigh Young. Although Tusiata Avia briefly had a poem about Mr. Luxon on the Newsroom site, which then disappeared minutes later before you got to read it. Very mysterious, and since you're in Auckland today, you'll ask the editor why but likely won't be able to tell anyone. It has to be said that certain poets you think excellent did publish poems in the year in question, and no names will be named as you sidestep reasons at a brisk clip.
I have no intention of breaking this mould, but I will say: why wait to be asked? We don't need to rely on apartment-seller-sponsored book awards or academic-institution-ratified best-of lists to know what's what. You can give your own awards and list your own lists. One day you will be asked to select the 25 best New Zealand poems of the year, and that day is today. I ask it, and urge it. I recommend you take on a year, perhaps last year, perhaps this, perhaps 1996, and try to read everything. Can't afford all the books? Fair. Who can? I suggest banding together with others, borrowing, lending, using ye olde library and taking advantage of what's free online. You will be glad you did—also horrified you did—and your 25 poems will not be the ones I have selected here. My views are more cultured and astute than yours, but, gritting grudging teeth, your picks are as valid. Seriously, I would be interested to find out, so let me know.
This is all I will say on subjectivity: it is unpleasant to crash up against the fussy lens of your own tastes. However, I will always want to know what other people enjoy as opposed to what they think I will enjoy, or worse, should enjoy. In the last couple of years I have joined a poetry club and this is its central premise. You read out poems you like (never your own). I had become a little jaded by poetry. I knew what I didn't like and it felt stuck on repeat. The club reminded me why I liked the thing in the first place. Hearing what others considered the best poems, I would often agree. My point is that I present here 25 poems I genuinely like without a thought as to how you might feel about them. Well, I hope you will like them and pat me on the back and say: 'No, well done.' But that's a whole other thing.
I had also become stuck on the New Zealand poets I liked and was not on the hunt to discover new ones. Getting to know any poet's concerns and driving aesthetic is work. You will often appreciate a poem more once you grasp the poet's general shtick. Poetry club has introduced me to some new New Zealand poets. So for instance, I was pre-primed to enjoy Zephyr Zhang's poems, one of which features here. The two poets who were most outstanding in the magazines this year were Zephyr Zhang and Erik Kennedy. Every poem was a hit. They are quite different writers, but both are funny. Inventive, surprising, artful, and funny. I don't only want comedy in poetry, but I'm glad of the place it has. Surprise, novelty, and invention being friends of both comedy and poetry. Hera Lindsay Bird of Dunedin is the best example I can think of for how well the two blend. She is not featured here, being a big baby too scared to write poems anymore, or some such. (She did read what might have been an unpublished number at Great Sounds Great in 2024, which was the best thing I'd heard all year.)
Most poems here come from published collections as opposed to magazine appearances. It means you will see some familiar and established names. I expect the reason is that in reading any poet's work at book length you not only come to terms with the style, intent, and preoccupations of their work, but you encounter the person too. Even for the books of poems that were less to my taste, I found myself liking the poet, having been dragged into their world. (I still didn't include them.)
Established poets yes, and sadly more than a typical share of dead poets. Paula Harris, Fleur Adcock, and Vincent O'Sullivan are no more. We're lucky to have some of their last poems here. The tragic death last year of American Samoan poet Caroline Sinavaiana-Gabbard is remembered in a harrowing poem by Selina Tusitala Marsh. Brian Turner and John Allison are both now gone as well and are much missed. Last year, Brian Turner published a collaborative poem with his partner Jillian Sullivan, and John Allison had some fine poems in Catalyst 21, one of which—'Injunction'—described what to do with him after death: 'flense my body'. It isn't the done thing to talk about what just missed out, but John will not object to me saying: seek this poem out.
While in the land of the dead, it must be mentioned that 2024's constant bombing, massacre, and degradation in Gaza carried out by the Israeli military and abetted by Western nations sat heavily with New Zealand writers. I have not included a specific poem of the many read. Partly this is because the poems coming out of Palestine said it better: the personal horror often told with a straight-faced surrealism. These Palestinian poems made me appreciate poetry generally, that it isn't strong or powerful or that it changes minds and hearts, but that it can say the thing, the true thing, the painful thing, without a sense of what that might achieve.
While I could carp and snipe and whine about what I object to in New Zealand poetry, the truth, in having had to eyeball the fire hose this year, is that there is a lot to admire. The magazine scene seems in good health, from the classics—Landfall, Takahē, and Aotearoa Poetry Yearbook—to the fast-becoming established and the new and occasionals: Starling, Catalyst, Sweet Mammalian, Mayhem, Overcom, Minarets, Fuego, Tarot, Bad Apple, Mote, and more. What I like especially is the geographic spread—yes it's still the main centres—but there is a good wash across the country, and no area's writers seem excluded. Demographic wash is covered, too. Queer writers, Māori writers, young writers, English-as-a-second-language writers have specific outlets.
The number of books published is also at a high-water level. There are many small presses publishing poetry, which is often loss-making financially but done for love, belief, or a muddled sense of duty. Other presses involve an element of self-publishing, or collective self-publishing. One that impresses me for the number and quality of books they are producing is the Cuba Press, and they too operate under a shared-cost model (for some). I'm glad of these DIY publishers, because we would not have access to some of New Zealand's best writers without them. The university presses, three of which appear here, still release books of poetry. Te Herenga Waka University Press published more collections than any New Zealand publisher last year. They are my publisher, but it isn't just grovelling and greasing when I say they were terrific books—and six of them, including Talia Marshall's, are represented in the 25 poems. I mention Talia Marshall because while her book was not poetry, it broke into poetry at times, and entirely so for the piece here. She was also a featured poet in Takahē 112, but in the end, as I read and reread it, the chapter from Whaea Blue featuring the dead Ans Westra was the most compelling; that and it slithered and changed in tone each time I read it. Two of the collections are from overseas publishers, including John Gallas's absurdly good book of tankas published by Carcanet in the UK. I highly recommend reading this pithy, dark, and bizarre book.
Speaking above about comedy in poetry requires mention of its opposite, tragedy. Tracey Slaughter, in her excellent introductory essay to the Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook 2024, remarks that the first thing that moves us to poetry is pain. There's a truth in this. If I'm honest, an annoying truth. It could also be that Tracey Slaughter is projecting her own relationship with poetry onto poetry in general. I do this here too, the selected poems being those that fit my (hopefully broad) vision of what poetry should be and what it is at its best. When I think of the thing that first moved me in and to poetry, perhaps it was pain. It was also novel expression and the delight of language: an older teenage girl sharing David Eggleton's early books with me and my friends. 'He uses the right words!' I remember saying. I remain inarticulate on this front. But there is real pain and the drudgery of suffering in some of the selection here. Kiri Piahana-Wong's poem lives amid personal suicidal impulse. The pain gives it power, and the language makes it beautiful.
A few poems were difficult to select. There are book-length poems out there, poems with mixed media, poems that switch back and forth from essay to poem, poems that are short fiction with line breaks, poems that are short fiction without line breaks. Difficult to select, so I didn't. But I have a few longish poems here. One of the most impressive voices of the last couple of years, Isla Huia, has a chunky number. The longest, though, is Richard Reeve's at 11 pages. I considered a shorter, funnier poem of his, 'Dog with Its Head out a Window', which begins 'Love it, love it, love it, love it, love it.' But the 11 pages on rain is such a fine thing and should be remembered. I thought of making a counterpoint to the long poem by adding a tiny one. I considered Apirana Taylor's poem 'Epiphany', which in its entirety reads, 'i am a living protest'. Good eh. But then I realised I could sneak it into this introduction without adding to the 25.
The final and most shocking thing about this selection of 25 poems is how many of them hinge on bird life. I am not an ornithologist or bird-nut! It has just fallen this way, and I have no reason nor made any attempt at a theme. I had realised this by the time I was choosing Robin Peace's poem. She has a terrific poem about albatrosses that might've appeared, but things had become crazy—Ash Davida Jane's geese, Philomena Johnson's ducks, Lloyd Jones's dotterels, Rebecca Hawkes's woodpeckers ignoring her 'in their diligence', Jake Arthur's robin, and many more. So I was pleased that ultimately I liked Robin Peace's space poem better.
Well. I challenge you to read, if not the entire year's poems for your own selection—and identical introductory rumination—then at least all 25 poems here. I have not yet mentioned all of the featured poets (Emma Neale! Carin Smeaton! Anne Kennedy! James Brown! Stacey Teague! Robert Sullivan! Cilla McQueen! Simon Sweetman! now I have), but I stand by each in the selection as the best poems of 2024's fire hose.
Nick Ascroft