Chords & Other poems by Sam Hunt
The subtle touch of Sam Hunt. [more]
Poetry
After by Alice Miller
After [more]
At Pukerua by Peter Bland
At Pukerua [more]
The night we ate the baby
We both got home late, the night we ate the baby,
and the girl from the agency was out the door as fast
as she could pocket fifty bucks. You were tired. I was tired.
I cracked open a beer and I watched the Prime Minister
smirk through another TV interview and I grew... [more]
Tom Glew by Jennifer Compton
Tom Glew
If this man hadn’t died untimely in his 37th year in 1886
his widow would not have been forced to keep house
for my great-great whatever and his thirteen children.
Long after his wife died she eventually married him.
He bequeathed it all, everything he died possessed of,
to her, to Lucy Glew, as... [more]
Australian Poetry review
It’s more than 1000 pages long and weighs 2kg, but Australian Poetry Since 1788 still isn’t comprehensive enough for everyone. [more]
Kingdon Animalia by Janis Freegard
Janis Freegard is equal parts jester and scientist in her debut poetry collection. Meanwhile, Airini Beautrais shares an offbeat sense of humour in her second. [more]
The leaf-ride by Dinah Hawken
It must have been daunting for a poet to be commissioned, as Dinah Hawken was by Chamber Music New Zealand, to write a sequence of poems to accompany performances of Haydn’s sublime The Seven Last Words of Our Saviour on the Cross. She rose to the occasion superbly (I heard... [more]
Inside Outside by Brian Turner
“Goethe reckoned everything inside/is also outside.” This theme, already announced in the book’s title, appears early in Brian Turner’s generous new collection, in a poem called Misunderstandings. The highbrow Goethe is juxtaposed with the matey “reckoned”, and this is a kind of Turner signature – bookish but also a little... [more]
Small holes in the Silence: Collected Works
Hone Tuwhare is our greatest poet of praise, and of bewilderment. [more]
Coming Ashore by Peter Bland
The winner of this year’s Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Poetry has crafted a shining new... [more]
The Hill of Wool by Jenny Bornholdt
There’s a lovely poem by the Polish writer Wisława Szymborska called Some People Like Poetry. Its title swings straight into a wry qualification:
“Some people – /that means not everyone,/Not even most of them, only a few.”
I remembered this when I opened my letterbox to find a package containing The... [more]