Te Whāriki: Reading Ten New Poets from Aoteatoa
edited by Anna Jackson, Dougal McNeill and Robert Sullivan
Auckland University Press, 2025

Auckland University Press page

The poets: Sam Duckor-Jones, Tayi Tibble, Claudia Jardine, essa may ranapiri, Rebecca Hawkes, Chis Tse, Oscar Upperton, Joanna Cho, Ruby Solly and Nafanua Purcell Kersel

The critics: Amy Marguerite, Tru Paraha, Anna Jackson, Robert Sullivan, Mark Masterson, Stephanie Burt, Dani Yourukova, Dougal McNeill, Sophie van Waardenberg, Brigid Quirke, Robin Peters and David Eggleton

a collage celebration

It is not often an introduction stalls me in my tracks and electrifies how I feel about reading and writing and sharing poetry. But the introduction to Te Whāriki: Reading Ten New Poets from Aoteatoa does exactly that. The three editors, Anna Jackson, Dougal McNeill and Robert Sullivan, sat in Robert’s lounge and crafted the piece over the course of two days. In a book delivering multiple weavings, the introduction is itself is a welcome mat, woven so thoughtfully with strands of aroha, experience, acumen, intuition. Yes, the metaphor perfectly encapsulates the width and depth of the book, but also offers a productive way of viewing poetry in Aotearoa. It mirrors exactly why I strive hard to be an ambassador for poetry and why poetry has helped me through the toughest year of my life.

The editors rightly acknowledge that ‘[p]oetry always renews itself’, that writers fossick in past traditions, writing with or against the grain of their discoveries. Across centuries, writers have experimented, paid homage, felt inspired, challenged and have written outside the status quo, questioned expectations, rules and regulations, and most importantly, damaging hierarchies. I sometimes wonder if an invisible torch is passed from one generation to the next, an ongoing flame to recondition the new, to absorb and respond to and with and against contemporary and past circumstances. It felt like this in the 1960s and 1970s when young men and women were experimenting with what poems could do, when women were moving out of the canon’s shadows, bringing the domestic and the personal with them if that was their desire.

Ah. This book’s introduction. We read in the first paragraph that, just as a whāriki is crafted from multiple strands, so to is contemporary poetry, its tendrils reaching into the past, invigorated by the present, foreshadowing the future. The editors like the idea of community building, with Te Whāriki boosting connections among readers, writers, teachers, students, critics, listeners, performers, bloggers.

This year I have witness the connectedness of poetry on the page, but also (by word of mouth) in myriad performances across Aotearoa: in cafes, bookshops, libraries, in Poetry Shelf’s online cafe readings. Burgeoning small presses and journals, both online and in print form, showcase voices of new writers, especially young writers. This sizzling connectedness is a vital strand in Te Whāriki. The editors use the word friendship, so let’s try approaching a book, a poem, a poetry scene, with this idea in mind. I had never approached it like this before, but I think over the past year I have experienced an extraordinary friendship with poetry, with poetry books and poems, with poets.

Markers of the current new wave of poetry are identified: romanticism, childhood, domestic details, anxiety, especially in view of a matrix of global and local crises. There are more, of course, there are so many pathways through the new poets’ work, so many ways to talk about new, but what I have found, more than anything, is that this is poetry that I feel, that I am moved by, that returns me to the world beyond my bush haven to experience new windows upon our world.

Ten diverse writers shine light on ten new poets, with each featured poet contributing a couple of poems and small piece of writing. What invigorates me about these readings is that although I am familiar and already deeply in love with the ten poets, the close readings open new pathways. And as I say on the blurb, this book makes my heart sing. The book shows so beautifully how critical writing can be in debt to academic traditions, but also how critical writing can open up a poet’s work with refreshing possibilities without trying to squeeze poetry into restrictive thought boxes. The attentive readings not only open pathways into a poet’s work but, through this critical alertness, open multiple possibilities for a wider terrain of reading and writing poetry.

I have lifted an excerpt that resonated with me from the editors’ individual readings, but I will also draw close to Sophie van Waardenberg’s ‘Reiterations’, her reading of Oscar Upperton. Honestly I could have selected any chapter to share highlights, but I have settled upon this chapter because it epitomises the utter of joy of reading and writing about poetry. Sophie draws us into Oscar’s two collections initially through form, moving in close to rhyme, repetition, vowel sounds, found material, twists and loops, double backs, reiterations, naming, frames upon which to hang things and the whole glorious art of recording and record creating. She drops a noun or verb or adjective into her sentence that catches me with its surprise and freshness: “It’s a villanelle, a poem requiring a sort of sandwiching rhyme – that is, a repetition of sound”. When discussing the move from the first collection to the second: “It’s also a jump from something mix-tape adjacent to a concept album”. Or this sweet arrival of personal experience: “Because of the incantatory qualities of repetition – and because I lived one of those prayer-heavy childhoods – I want to say this poem feels like a prayer. But is is not asking for anything, not even for the strength or patience to withstand something suboptimal, as most prayers do. It seems more practical than that.” You need to read the chapter yourself to get the thrill of an inspired close reading, but here is the final paragraph:

“In an essay called ‘Further Injury’, published in the online journal Too Little / Too Hard, British poet Emily Berry interrogates her resistance to the idea that poetry is a life-saving force.3 For her, writing poetry is like prying a wound further open. If it is a remedy, it’s a painful one. But she concludes that perhaps having your life saved is unpleasant, too. It might come not as ‘a luscious infusion of relief’ but in the form of ‘amputation, medicine that poisons you, untold sacrifices’. Upperton’s poetry, its working out through repetition, suggests that the only way we can save life is not really to heal, not even to relieve pain, but to record it. And maybe the best way to record it, truthfully, is to say, a lot of times: ‘I was here, I was here, I was here.’ James Barry was here. Oscar Upperton was here. We wanted things we couldn’t always have.”

I keep pulling poetry books from my review stack on my desk that send me into a lexicon of superlatives. This book is no exception and I have barely scratched the surface of its rewards. Read Stephanie Burt on essa may ranapiri (‘Teeth Shine in the dark’) or David Eggleton on Nafanua Purcell Kersel (‘Bone Pen and Blood Ink’). Tru Paraha on visual poetry through feeling and form and Amy Marguerite’s approach to a new generation of poets through a potluck dinner. To celebrate its arrival in the world, I invited a few of the featured poets to select a poetry book they have loved in 2025. I have also selected a small extract from each of the editors’ chapters that resonated deeply with me, and a couple of extracts from the poets’ contributions.

This is a book to pack in holiday bags and reap infinite rewards over summer.

A tasting platter

from ‘A Quietly Italicised Yes‘, Sam Duckor Jones by Anna Jackson:

“‘I put play at the very very top of everything that is important in the world’, Duckor-Jones has said. This was in an interview with Eva Corlett for a Guardian article about the church Gloria, described by Corlett as ‘a campy pink wonderland with tinsel curtains and a neon “Gloria” sign’, and by Duckor-Jones as representing ‘a kind of quiet fabulosity. His poetry shares this kind of quiet fabulosity.”

from ‘Representation Is Important’, Tayi Tibble by Robert Sullivan:

“So, what have I learned from reading this text? As Lesley Wheeler’s introduction to her book of essays on poetics, Poetry’s Possible Worlds, eloquently and compassionately states, reading poetry personally runs the risk of subsuming a more interesting text to the mundanity of one’s own experiences. I am a middle-aged poet with family commitments. My reading practice prioritises enjoyment, cultural identifications and pleasure to be derived from a text. I love to immerse myself in a poem, or a collection of poems, and learn about that other world through another’s sensory life and cultural and cognitive experience. The transport to other worlds that Wheeler speaks of is sped up in Tibble’s text. The worlds within worlds are deftly evoked in short prose sections. The twelve sections might be a blue-black hair cloak, if such a cultural artefact ever existed. The altered mythopoetics here – the altered Māui, Pocahontas’s altered name, the altered Samson as younger sister, the matrilineal descent line as hair turned into Medusan snakes, Scherzinger as icon, and the speaker looking for love, and representation, and tino rangatiratanga – encapsulates female heterogeneity without encapsulating it because of the sisterly hair-cutting scissors and the soft-dissolving fluid collage of identifications, attachments and detachments. This opening poem in an exciting book of poems is a marvellous, ever-moving heart-sore and full-hearted achievement.”

from ‘A Vivid Dream’, Chris Tse by Dougal McNeill:

“Following a word’s connotations, here tracing the patterns of a word and allowing ourselves to desire language and to be desired by its folds, to limn a lover nestling inside the poet’s own name as a thumb nestled against a body in speech, is to give ourselves over to the big mood, the utopian, the will of this voice. The parents who, in He’s So MASC’s sonnets, might ‘perhaps’ be ‘taken aback’ by the present of the ‘unnamed male’ with whom the poet has ‘shared more than each other’s time’, are altered in the course of this encounter too. Now, in Super Model Minority, both father and lover and poet find ways of being together and recognising each other in the act of naming. The desire to be desired is, finally, in Chris Tse’s work, a desire for and in community. If his are songs of thanks, they are also, for us, opportunities for praise. 謝.”

a 2025 poetry list selected by XX poets

essa may ranapiri

Clay Eaters, Gregory Kan, Auckland University Press, 2025

This book for me was like an ideal synthesis of his first two collections. The space and intimacy of Under Glass and the control and historiocity of This Paper Boat. I felt as a ghost leaving or returning to an island (can one really say they are arriving or leaving ever) by the end of the book.

Ruby Solly

If We Knew How To We Would, Emma Barnes, Auckland University Press, 2025

I was lucky enough to get to read at Emma’s launch, lending my voice to some of their poems, which felt very special. There is something gentle and surreal to this book, though it also has so many hard hitters that pull us to the the mirror and show us not only ourselves, but society; how we have made it and how it has made us. There are moments of radical dreaming. There are moments of forlorn acceptance. There are moments of queer joy and sorrow; this was a book I needed this year and I’m so glad Emma has brought it into existence.

Chris Tse

Symphony of Queer Errands, by Rachel O’Neill, Tender Press, 2025

What I love most about a Rachel O’Neill collection is the constant thrill of surprise that sweeps you from poem to poem. Symphony of Queer Errands is a tremendous feat of imagination, from its ensemble of invented queer instruments to its treatment of language as something elastic and uncontainable. There’s something both dangerous and joyous in its attempts to capture what it feels like to make something out of nothing and that constant need to reach for something that’s just out of reach.

Nafanua Purcell Kersel

Over Under Fed, Amy Marguerite, Auckland University Press, 2025.

This year I loved Over Under Fed by Amy Marguerite (AUP). I was honoured to be able to read early drafts of this book through our shared MA workshop. Even so, the final published collection caught me off-guard with its sharp language and timeless yet contemporary vibe. Marguerite’s poetry is generous but also restrained which makes for a beautiful and compelling collection. As a poet and a reader, I gain so much from the insight into her raw and tender experiences of ED, love and obsession. I feel close to her pain but still safe in the in the poetry where there is comfort in form and surprise in content. This allows me a vantage point that feels askew and still perfectly balanced. Marguerite’s skill as deep-thinking scholar of language and craft is also displayed in Te Whāriki: Reading Ten New Poets from Aotearoa in the form of a critical essay about independent literary journals.   

Rebecca Hawkes

No Good, Sophie van Waardenberg, Auckland University Press, 2025

I’ve thought often of Sophie’s poems we published in Sweet Mammalian a ways back – Poem in which I am good, Song of the Selfish Girl – wondering what kind of lives they’d lead in a full collection. The book arrived in my life at just the right time. I too have been away and returned. I have danced to the end of love, and lived in my wrongness, my chastened salt. Grief has prowled and lingered. For years now, I’ve been thinking of the lines Everybody I love will live forever./ Everybody I love will love me. How one can cast a wish into the world and in saying it, know its impossibility. But the book isn’t fatalistic. Yes, fate (loss, grief, limited time spent without any extraordinary grace, the preciousness of early and middle and late love) permeates the poems.Sophie’s poems find many delights in the day – stonking blue afternoons, wedges of good fruit, enthrallments – but also don’t flinch from the longing to share the days, to describe the world to a listener who can understand the speaker for what they see, to belong in the body and the upturned seasons outside it, to go on but also to halt for the muchness of all that must in its time be felt and held with all the weight of a heart.

Sam Duckor-Jones

Moon Too Heavy, Jac jenkins, Pavlova Press, 2025

I feel quite blessed to have read a lot of wonderful books of poetry this year!  The one I will shout out is Moon Too Heavy, a slim volume by Jac Jenkins, published by Pavlova Press.  Because it has a confident musicality & an artful physicality, which I am always drawn to.  & because it contains just the right amount of poems, nothing more, which I am always impressed by & jealous of.  It’s kind of in the Rebecca Hawkes school of farmgirl poetry (Jac lives on a Far North beef farm) and as such there is a lot of BODY in her poems.  Tightly controlled floridity.  Sex, sexiness, pregnancy, girlhood, motherhood – these are not so much ‘written about’ as they are played with – I can imagine Jac playing.  Playing in her rural poetry lab.  Using languages of mathematics & science & nature to experiment & play.  My favourite poem in the collection is a sort of list poem, a dense evolutionary chant that begins broadly: 

Oceanic hydrothermal vent begat Last Universal Common Ancestor begat Eukaryota begat Unikonts begat….. 

etc etc etc until eventually narrowing in and ending with

…bore Jean bore Anne bore Jac bore / Kate

That a poem thick with complex scientific language can become, in three stanzas, so intimate and dear is miraculous & it’s a delicious poem to read quietly in ones head but very difficult to read aloud to a listening room (I tried).  Moon Too Heavy is a weird little book about life that I loved very much.