Poetry

Nice morning for it, Adam Vincent O’Sullivan (Victoria University Press, 2004)
Winner Poetry Category in the 2004 Montana New Zealand Book Awards.

Vincent O’Sullivan’s poems reveal a powerful intellect brought to bear on a world of continual change and curiosity. Stepping deftly through a breathtaking range of voices and forms, this book places poems of wry satirical humour against those of remarkable sweetness. What is offered is a poetry of openness and moving humility, as well as an insight into the peculiar challenges of being human.

‘There is a kind of luminous spirituality about O’Sullivan’s poetry, that long after you have read the poems, continues to reside in the objects or situations the poems describe.’ – Anna Jackson

Lifted, Bill Manhire (Victoria University Press, 2005)
‘There are mothers and fathers, Kevin, whom we barely know.
They lift us. Eventually we all shall go
into the dark furniture of the radio.’

The last lines of Bill Manhire’s astonishing poem ‘Kevin’ lie at the heart of this book.

These poems want urgently to know how the secular spirit can lift itself in the face of mortality and human violence. They are full of richness and courage and surprise, turning from grief to curiosity; then to beauty, humour, anger, gratitude, acceptance – and once again to curiosity.

‘Turning the pages of Lifted, no reader can fail to be surprised and delighted by the variety of voices and tones. Some poems are humorous (‘The Confident Troubador’), others are melancholy, quizzical, confessional and satiric ... Manhire shows not only his mature formal skills but his ability to look unflinchingly into the heart of things. He is a poet in which a sly sense of humour is coupled with a respect for whatever truths a poem can wring out of experience ... Manhire’s poems make us feel as if we are really there.’
Billy Collins, The Dominion Post

The Time of Giants, Anne Kennedy (Auckland University Press, 2005)
Another original, delightful, moving book of poems from Wellington-born poet Anne Kennedy, whose sequence Sing-song won the Poetry Category in the 2004 Montana New Zealand Book Awards.

Time of the Giants, another sequence, is much less tied to the poet's own experience. Wonderfully inventive and both disturbing and amusing, it focuses on a family of giants and in particular a young woman giant and her efforts to conceal from her lover (normal size) just how tall she really is. Characteristically this fabulous tale also includes gentle satire on contemporary manners, witty language play and a warm and affectionate tone.

Wild Dogs Under My Skirt, Tusiata Avia (Victoria University Press, 2004)
Tusiata Avia’s first collection of poetry Wild Dogs Under My Skirt draws on two different cultures, and charts the sometimes painful points of their intersection. These poems are confrontational and entertaining, raw and lyrical; they occupy legend and history – ‘we are direct descendants of flesh-eaters’ – yet break through into an urban landscape that is just as arresting and richly patterned. Avia’s poetry is alive with the energy and rhythm of performance poetry and of an oral tradition, but it also stakes out a unique physical life on the page, reshaping our language and our understanding of New Zealand culture.

‘Tusiata’s poetry is quite revolutionary in the sense that, not only does it define the face of Pacific literature in New Zealand, but it redefines the face of New Zealand literature itself.’ – Sia Figiel

Milk and Honey, Michele Leggott (Auckland University Press, 2005)
In Michele Leggott’s new collection deft word play, allusion and quotation go along with liquid sounds, intense images and stirring rhythms. There are moving elegies and haunting love poems and many echoes of other poets, from Lorca to Robert Duncan to Alan Brunton. There are many signs too of a poet moving into an international context; a sense of the wider world pervades the latter part of this text. The book is in three parts with a gateway at either end. It can be read from the front or the back and there is a seriousness but also songs along the way.

Oxford Anthology of New Zealand Poetry in English, edited by Jenny Bornholdt, Greg O’Brien and Mark Williams (Oxford University Press, 1997).
Winner of the 1997 Montana Book Awards, poetry section.

This comprehensive Anthology of New Zealand Poetry in English spans more than a century, revealing the richness, vitality and range of styles and voices to be found in the body of New Zealand verse.

Established figures such as Ursula Bethell, Allen Curnow, James K. Baxter, Hone Tuwhare and Alistair Te Ariki Campbell are given strong selections, as are such previously underrated figures as Eileen Duggan and Mary Stanley. Contemporary poets are generously represented, with major selections from such pivotal figures as Vincent O'Sullivan, Lauris Edmond, C. K. Stead, Bill Manhire, Ian Wedde and Elizabeth Smither.

With an eye to both fairness and range, the editors have compiled a collection of New Zealand poetry remarkable as much for its diversity of poetic forms as for its wealth of voices.

Summer, Jenny Bornholdt (Victoria University Press, 2003)
Summer, a collection of poems by Jenny Bornholdt, one of New Zealand’s best-loved poets is warm, witty, engaging and accomplished. The superb cover is by award-winning designer Sarah Maxey and the line drawings are by poet, essayist, artist (and Jenny's husband) Greg O’Brien.

Jenny held the Katherine Mansfield Fellowship in Menton, France in 2002. Most of the poems in Summer record the experiences of the poet and her family through the Mediterranean summer. The book begins, however, with a powerfully moving group of poems from the previous summer – ‘the summer that wouldn’t go’ – when Jenny’s father lay dying.

‘Jenny Bornholdt is one of New Zealand's best-loved poets. She allows her poems to immerse themselves in marvellous details of everyday life. Constantly through the years she has served up poems rich in anecdote and incident ... Jenny writes about all the important things in life: love, sex, family and memories. Summer is another slim volume full of shimmering, lovely thoughts ... Summer is full of mellow magic.’ Otago Daily Times

Oooooo……!!!, Hone Tuwhare (Steele Roberts, 2005)
Oooooo......!!! presents diverse new poems alongside earlier unpublished work. It is a wild, unpredicatable expression of exuberance for words, love, and social justice.

The poems are about the act of writing; about Hone's beloved Shirley Grace; about his hunger for the bounty of Tangaroa, music and sex. They reflect with humour and raw candour the challenges of ageing while having an unquenchable lust for life.

Hone Tuwhare has won two Montana NZ Book Awards, has been Te Mata Poet Laureate, and holds two honorary doctorates in literature. Now 82, he writes as passionately as ever.

matuhi/needle, Hinemoana Baker (Victoria University Press, 2004)
matuhi/needle was published jointly with Perceval Press, the California publisher owned and operated by Pilar Perez and Viggo Mortensen. It is a beautifully-designed hardback, featuring five paintings by the Ngai Tahu artist Jenny Rendall and includes a CD featuring Hinemoana Baker reading six of her poems, and a song excerpted from her album Puawai.

Many cultures converge and challenge each other in the poetry of Baker – most obviously, her parents’ Maori and Pakeha ancestries. In matuhi/needle, her début collection, there are poems of praise, love and gratitude. Words, phrases and cultural concepts in the Maori world are given a new and different life via her love and recovery of Te Reo – which can be translated as ‘the voice’. Other poems are inscribed with the sordid and the badly-behaved, or admit to feelings of inadequacy and avoidance. Some reflect a history of personal and political invasion and occupation. All are alive with grace, intellect and control.