The final densely gorgeous collection I’ll discuss in this accidental thesis is my highlight from Otago University Press: Elizabeth Morton’s Naming the Beasts. This is a dread menagerie that teems with hauntings. Morton’s pithy, verbose poems shimmer with the iridescent blues of blowflies lifting off an ox’s carcass. Cattle trucks and heatwave nectarines ferment summer stenches that invoke a sinister nostalgia. In pedal-to-the-metal poems, inevitable chaos is held barely at bay by the baying of ordinary dogs and assurances of unalterable fate; ‘This is not our fault / we were carried here like spores’.
Like Holdaway’s gorse, Morton’s bestiary provides one guiding motif through which to enter the book – but the collection sweeps you up in wider themes of time and ancestry and industry, those untamed death-seeking impulses, the guilt that remains with you when you wake from a mischievous dream and the inheritance of missionary shame. From ‘God of nations’:
I want to say I know this place with my eyes closed. I can run, butt naked, through cabbage rows and dairy cows, and the Waikato will annunciate my name with a branding iron and an ear tag that speaks to a bloodline sniffed out by regret. I am writing in my first language. My second is shame. When I dream I dream words I cannot spell.
Morton’s poems are lush, her lexicon tangy. I’ll leave you one more taster, on that redeye red-sky vibe:
Cowboys are an animal left too long
The teabag left too long in the sky, steeping red. The hackberry struck
by headlights, wild and afraid, cuffed by the end of another day.
I used to have a name here. I arrived in dreams, running, like you,
past the smoked-out manger, through a brushfire where even the birds are lit.
Marsh rabbits and woodrats shiver in the ash-cut stiltgrasses.
We were animals, once. Venom and teeth and mandibles,
all set forward and hungry. You licked all surfaces, tonguing
the bark splinters and the hot tars. I fed the deer and the old milk cow.
And you sharpened a picture of a state down South,
where the wasps knit a paper nest called Confederacy,
where names are just things to be taken to the storm drain and
drowned – Kittens, lapping the gun-powder off your palms.
🔥 🔥 🔥
In 2022, if not always, I have responded most to poetry with a red raw pulse, but even here I haven’t been able to discuss in depth all the books I lived and breathed – or those spines still staring out at me to read. As I trail off, I can’t help but bemoan the missed opportunity to comment on so many other collections of zest and merit that deserve your eyes and ears. New Zealand poetry’s heaviest hitter, THWUP, released a bumper crop, and I haven’t wedged a word in edgeways for Erik Kennedy’s formally audacious and entertainingly activist Another Beautiful Day Indoors, the shimmering and luminous Nick Ascroft’s The Stupefying, and thoughtful character studies in James Brown’s The Tip Shop. Also from Otago University Press, Michael Steven’s Night School rewards with a precision and economy of language that unravel a reader through a heady litany of intoxicants. The first release from Briana Jamieson’s new Mineral Press is a fall of gentle rain, with Jane Paul’s Ebbs & Floods burning driftwood and pallets on Irish beaches, where I became possessed of a sudden desire to go fry a swan on the campfire (‘He tells me the Queen / owns all the swans in Ireland. / To eat one is a crime.’). Published well outside the scope of this assignment but still making waves in bestseller lists in the year since it dropped is Tayi Tibble’s sophomore triumph Rangikura, titularly a red-sky book that deftly navigates desire and exploitation. This year it has been heartening to see her 2018 debut Poūkahangatus make a new splash via international distribution in the USA.
It feels unfair to focus only on full-length collections when there are so many more authors and editors sharing verdant work in our vibrant terrarium of local journals. Sweet Mammalian, Min-a-rets, Poetry NZ Yearbook, Turbine, Mayhem, Takahē and Landfall are persisting gamely, variously online and in print – and if my SM editorial experience is anything to go by, receiving more stellar verse than ever. The fresh queer platform Bad Apple has shared vigorous, unpretentious and gratifying work in the playful tradition of freewheeling online mags. My money’s on Starling as nowadays the country’s most influential journal – open only to under-25s, the editors’ eye for talent and enthusiasm for their authors is unparalleled, and Starling grads (like Essa and I!) are now filling shelves with solo works.
Of course, poems don’t live only on the page. New Zealand’s slam scene is thriving – as evidenced at the regional finals I witnessed in Christchurch and Dunedin. Freya Daly Sadgrove’s Show Ponies performance troupe has continued to bring the party, with backup dancers and musicians in collaboration with new extraordinary performers like Ruby Solly, Emma Barnes, Daniel Goodwin, and Freya herself. Show Ponies added more notches to its bedpost with a growing line-up and sell-out performances at Verb Wellington, the National Young Writers’ Festival in Dunedin, and the first international outing for the Brisbane Young Writers’ Festival. I hear that poet-playwright Nathan Joe’s Scenes from a Yellow Peril was a smash hit on stage, and his script has been lavishly presented in limited edition book form – one of my to-reads coming into 2023. Hardworking festivals from Verb to Word are carving out space for poetry at the most lavish end of literati life – plus the everyday readings continue in bars and bookshops, nooks and crannies, scraped together sometimes for koha and mainly free.
Poetry is a strange beast that boggles market forces even as it succumbs somewhat to them at the point of commercial publication. As evident from the tomes covered here, poetry books in New Zealand tend to be published either via the altruism of university presses sheltered by institutions of edu-capital (these days seemingly hellbent on dismantling their humanities departments while still claiming advertorial clout for writing awards), or the gumption and tenacity of independent presses. Poetry is a twilight sport, operating in the nooks and crannies, living off loose change and book launch charcuterie boards. In this tiny cloud country even our most mainstream presses have an indie sensibility. More so than the knells of doomsday, I suggest that the generosity of committed community – built around a shared passion that plays out in radically different and deeply personal work – is part of what powers the radiance of New Zealand poetry right now.
Bravá to everyone making it happen; writers, publishers, readers! Thanks for humouring your histrionic bards (me), and here’s to another blistering year on the books.
