It’s 2014. Time to expand / add to the Trans-Tasman conversation on poetics between Australia and New Zealand.

The Best New Zealand Poems 2013 has now been published. Online only. Check it out. Congratulation to Murray Edmond, Anne Kennedy and Michele Leggott, their poems first appeared in Cordite with ‘NZ 6-Seater: A Chapbook Curated by Ian Wedde‘, and to Ian Wedde’s ‘The Lifeguard‘, an excerpt we first ran from a longer poem. Too, props for Anna Jackson, Amy Brown and Selina Tusitala Marsh, who we’ve also recently published.

Series editor, member of Cordite’s Academic Advisory Board, Chris Price, Senior Lecturer at Victoria University’s International Institute of Modern Letters, says: ‘While many previous editors of Best New Zealand Poems have themselves been poets, it’s been stimulating and revealing to have the 2013 edition selected by two professional critics of New Zealand literature. I’m sure their introduction will provoke further conversations and debates.’

Another way for us to do this is to review some intriguing books from across the choppy waters. Fittingly, we began with Stephen Oliver’s Intercolonial, continued with a look at Selina Tusitala Marsh’s Dark Sparring and a collected of Alan Brunton, and now have Lisa Samuels’s take on the The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature.

We plan on taking a look at new books by Amy Brown, Lisa Samuels, Michele Leggott and a few others as well throughout the year. From somebody who massively geeked out on the Flying Nun sound from the later 1980s, so good and so far away at the time (think Bailter Space from a Walkman on Wild Horse Island), that somebody being me, I’m excited to check out the work.