No Good, Sophie van Waardenberg
Auckland University Press, 2025

What initially hooks us into a poem? For me, there is no singular response. Indeed if there were, it might limit what poetry can be and do. When I first started reading Sophie van Waardenberg’s new collection, No Good, I jotted down two words in my notebook: rhythm and voice. I was hooked. I was drawn into the musical cadence of a speaker speaking, drawn into the under and over currents of spiky, thistle, bloom. And as I read the collection, on a number of occasions over the past few months, crucial questions arrived. I was especially musing on the way a poem might become both self and other.

The title is the perfect welcome mat into the collection, particularly coupled with the cover illustration, where ‘good’ wavers, and I gaze at the beetle on the apple that is both good and not good. Pausing on the welcome mat, a cascade of (centuries) of good girl propaganda spins in my mind, and I am peering into the no good to see the next apple in the bowl, a portal of good in the pillowcase of no good.

And then, there on the first page, the ‘Poem in Which I am Good’, and the welcome mat widens, and still I am musing on the good girl, the no good girl, and the lyrical voice is blisteringly affecting.

Everything will be good, and the trousers I left
to blow in the wind and the rain and lemon leaves,

them too. The linen will keep its soft thatching.

Who is she? How is she? The speaking voice gently draws me into both flawed and happy, and as much as I am on the edge of weeping, I hold tight to the coat-tails of joy. These words. These lines. These poems. I read : ‘A girl is born out of comparison.’ Read the glorious poem, ‘Sticky’, and feel the possibility of girl stretch oh so wide, even in the complicated history of her making, whether personal, or across centuries, or as negotiable and contested ideas.

A girl is filth and bright. A girl is born
out of comparison. A girl can sing or can’t.
A girl is held inside a duck’s bill, weighed
against a slice of bread for softness.
What flour is a girl made of? Wheat or corn?
How can a girl get clean again?

The middle section of the book, ‘Cremation sonnets’ resembles a grief casket, where the poems lead in multiple directions, carrying us between presence and absence, letting go, and unable to let go. This lost love. This elegiac memory.

The final sequence of poems, so utterly moving, are written with the ink of love. The poems are addressed to ‘you’, written across a distance between here and there, between hunger and satisfaction, dream and reality, turning away and moving close. This is love. This loved and loving woman. This is ache and this is a yearning to love and be loved. Such gentleness, such a slow perfect unfolding of what is special, with only so much revealed and gently placed in the pockets of the poems. And if this is a love that is over, such deep sadness, it seems to me, that love finds a way to linger in residues, traces, scents.

The word I write in my notebook in my latest reading is bridge, the way poems become a bridge, establish vital bridges. Think sweet and sour crossings, fluid and awkward, here and there, good and not good. Not as a restrictive dichotomy but as a series of movements, like music, like the way personal experience resists pigeon holes. Traversing the myriad bridges in Sophie’s sublime collection makes me both think and feel the world. Yes I am thinking and feeling a version of her world, but also a version of my world. And this moves me.

Rhythm, voice, bridges. I hold this book out to you so you may find your own self-affecting crossings.

A stagger of lemons and a goneness
I can’t swallow. Hello the same feeling,

didn’t I wash you off,
you get everywhere, sog up my arms

and droop me. It’s something alien
in my gut that knows you so well.

I say it again: I am not a creature of sorrow.
But I could be proper sad if I put my mind to it,

if someone dropped me from a height.

from ‘The Getting Away’

Sophie van Waardenberg is a writer from Tāmaki Makaurau. She holds an MFA from Syracuse University where she was editor-in-chief of Salt Hill Journal. Her first chapbook, ‘does a potato have a heart?’, was published in AUP New Poets 5 (2019). Her poems about eating carbohydrates and kissing girls can be found in Cordite, Sweet Mammalian, The Spinoff and Best New Zealand Poems.

Listen to Sophie read two poems on Poetry Shelf: ‘Self-Portrait as Adolescent Covered in Flour’, ‘Hymn to the Insomniac in Fool’s Spring’

Auckland University Press page