Kirsti Whalen is a poet and disability advocate currently studying Creative Writing at Manukau Institute with Robert Sullivan and Eleanor Catton. She has written and read poetry since she was a child, and has won both the Katherine Mansfield Young Writers Award and the Bell Gully National Secondary Schools Poetry Award. She has published poems in various journals.

My reaction to Kirsti’s poems: ‘Kirsti is a fresh young voice on the poetry horizon line. Her submission indicates she has an astonishing ear for the way sounds soar on a line, the way they dip and fall. Her syntax is bold and on the move, but she is unafraid of neither simplicity nor silent beats. The poems take you into the heart of family from a mother’s x-rays to kitchen dinners to a grandmother’s quince trees. Each poem is brought alive to a startling degree with sensual detail, electric connections, canny ellipsis, judicious repetition. It is a voice that feels original, that is willing to take risks and that exudes a love of writing in every nook and cranny.’

Did your childhood shape you as a poet? What did you like to read? Did you write as a child? What else did you like to do?

I was lucky enough to be part of a writing group from primary school, run first by my principal and then, after he left the school, my mum, who was a teacher. So I was taught from the start that writing is important, and a valid way to be spending one’s time. My parents always emphasized the value of creativity and never questioned my whims, for which I am very thankful.

My grandparents lived on a farm in the King Country, and this was my haven. I spent all the time I possibly could there, even catching the bus on weekends and holidays when Mum wouldn’t drive me. I am, in fact, a prize winning chicken breeder, taking out the pet category at nine years old! I think poetry is the opportunity to study life and the intricate world in one’s own time; I spent many hours a day with the baby chicks, and many more hours with dying cattle, parched with drought, trying to ease them out of this world. I gardened beside my grandmother and ran with the dog pack, rode my horse bareback and swam with eels so old they turned into legends. I baked bread with my grandfather. I made paper and scrapbooked with my mum. I went for pre-dawn walks with my brother, and cracked the ice over the chickens’ water bowls. I picked wild mushrooms and stewed them and I mustered cattle all day with my uncle, who taught me that girls are strong too. A good education in poetry.

And yes, I read. I was a bookish little thing, and started primary school with few friends except those I found in books. The first book I truly obsessed over was Starbright and the Dream Eater, by Joy Cowley, which Mum ended up confiscating so I would read something else, after my twentieth re-read. And from my fifth birthday my parents would buy me a hefty poetry anthology, from which I read my bedtime stories. Poetry was always fiction’s equal, to me.

When you started writing poems as a young adult, were there any poets in particular that you were drawn to (poems/poets as surrogate mentors)?

I fell in love with Janet Frame from an early age, who was introduced to me by my creative writing teacher at high school, Ros Ali. I have always loved her poem ‘Rain on the Roof’ above all others, except maybe ‘High Country Weather’ by James K. Baxter. The first book of poetry I bought with my own money was The Adulterer’s Bible, by Cliff Fell. Probably an odd choice for a young teenager, but I think it taught me a lot about language, risk and experimental work. I have always been fed a healthy diet of New Zealand poets and writers, so my influences tend to be local, though I was also a pretty hard-core Keats fan, and my cat was called Shakespeare.

I love the way your poems take risks. Your syntax is fidgety, your poems have an electric pulse, there is a deep-seated feeling but it is not over-baked, you don’t give everything away. What are key things for you when you write a poem?

Thank you! A key part of my writing process is having just the right song on repeat, to lend consistency to the tone. And I read each work aloud, over and over again, and then examine the structure to see if the punctuation offers the same rhythm. But the most important thing is making sure that the imagery pinpoints my intentions precisely, in a way I’ve never read before. I try to surprise myself. And if I get sick of the poem, I ditch it. A good poem should last forever. And it has to open a door to something bigger, even if it’s only about something small. I imagine poems like rooms, and if I can’t walk through that poem and into an adventure, it’s not working.

What poets have mattered to you over the past year? Some may have mattered as a reader and others may have been crucial in your development as a writer.

The last year has been a big one for my writing as I moved back to New Zealand, with the intention of giving myself the chance to really focus on my work. So the main influences have been my tutors and lecturers, Robert Sullivan, Ellie Catton, Witi Ihimaera and Anne Kennedy. Despite my contention with his politics I’ve read a lot of Ezra Pound of late and have also had a renaissance of my love of Kerouac, who is a heavy, though possibly invisible, influence.

You are studying Creative Writing at Manukau Institute of Technology with Robert Sullivan and Eleanor Catton. What do you take from this experience? Has it changed your writing in any way?

I think the biggest lesson I’ve been taught is that I cannot rest on my strengths. Ellie is a highly perceptive and her influence has forced me to examine what is self-indulgent, and what is necessary for the reader’s experience. I have learnt that fortes must be challenged, and that pushing oneself and being pushed by others can uncover new fortes, which would remain hidden if friends and family continued to tell you how great you are.

I’ve also changed in my approach to my work, treating it as a profession, rather than a hobby. And I am grateful for the highly instructive workshop format of the programme, as well as the gift of such excellent mentors.

What irks you in poetry?

When poetry exists to serve the poet’s ego. Appropriation of stories that don’t belong to the poet. The presence of pity. The presence of the patriarchy. Cliché. Collections that haven’t been edited well.

What delights you?

When poetry exists to serve the reader’s experience of the world. Stories being told by voices that haven’t previously held a platform. The presence of empowerment. The presence of the strength of women and their stories. Originality. Collections so sleekly edited that they hold a better narrative that a young adult novel.

Name three NZ poetry books that you have loved.

There are so many! I love Brown Girls in Bright Red Lipstick by Courtney Sina Meredith, anything by Lauris Edmond and 99 Ways into New Zealand Poetry, which I have found incredibly instructive. I also really love New New Zealand Poets in Performance, which is a spectacular anthology. It really captures the voice of New Zealand’s contemporary poetic scene.

The constant mantra to be a better writer is to write, write, write and read read read. You also need to live! What activities enrich your writing life?

I’ve travelled a lot and lived in Scotland and Australia, as well as working as a camel farmer in Austria, a nudist laughing yoga instructor in the south of France and living with families in Tahiti, Nepal and India. I think being exposed to all kinds of lifestyles and engaging with things that take my breath away for both their beauty and their humanity is extremely important. I also work in the disability world, and am lucky to spend time with kids who see things in a very fresh way. One of my little boys told me my arms were like peaches and his tummy was made of lemonade, because he loved me. That’s poetry!

Some poets argue that there are no rules in poetry and all rules are to be broken. Do you agree? Do you have cardinal rules?

My mentor Robert Sullivan, in the words of Ezra Pound, has drilled my cardinal rule into me, by way of a bright poster on our workshop room’s wall. Make it new! And in the works of Katherine Mansfield: Risk. Risk anything. If I’m doing these two things, and not appropriating anyone else’s story in a way I consider disrespectful, then every other rule is there to be challenged. I don’t really draw a line between poetry and prose, either. I like to think that poetry is more a feeling that a set of rules, though I do like to honour the tradition of poetry, and the challenge of structure, metre and various other devices.

Do you find social media an entertaining and useful tool or white noise?

I find it very distracting! And I think social media has taught us to expect quite instant feedback and gratification, which is somewhat demoralising when working on a project which requires a private, long-term investment, like a book. I wish I was brave enough to leave social media, to be honest, but I also see its importance in terms of engaging with an audience, and building a network of like-minded people. I try to be very careful, however, to promote my work, rather than myself. Social media’s influence can shift this balance to a more ego-based place, so I try to be very careful. I am also careful not to underestimate social media’s influence and infiltration of our collective conscience.

How do you envision your debut book?

I like beautiful things, so I’d like to have a book that someone could hold in their hands, feeing like what they’re clutching is special. I think I have one story I need to tell before I am free to tell other stories. I was my mum’s carer for years during her battle with cancer, and I want to write something that other young carers can read, and feel less alone than I did. And if there’s one line in there that makes someone gasp, as if something has changed for him or her… well, that’s the dream!

That seems to me like an important book to write. I see that commitment to life and to humanity in your writing. What were some key influences in your submitted poems?

The women of my family are the crux of my submission, particularly their strength, and their absence. I’m a feminist, and I hope that my work has subtle echoes of the influence of Marilyn French; Eve Ensler; Kate Millett. I have also spend the last few years engaging with spoken word, and I do write my poetry to be voiced by the reader, so I am influenced by the musicality of poets like Ursula Rucker, and the idea of voice and resonance.

Brava! With overt and covert misogyny still at work, and a culture of bullying still entrenched in our society, it is refreshing to hear young women speak out (like Lorde for example).

Are you happy to talk about what you are currently writing and what you hope to write soon, or do you prefer not to?

I try to keep things close to my chest but I’m a pretty open book and tend to dish too quickly about the things I’m excited about! While I’m an atheist I also have this romantic notion of the universe, and that some things need to be released into the world to be realised. Sometimes speaking to something makes it real. I’m also very lucky to have two best friends, one of whom is a poet in Melbourne and the other completing her MFA at the Michener Center in Austin, Texas, so we talk work a lot!

Do you like performing your work?

I used to. I like reading my work, but I have recently ‘retired’ (at 25!) from performance poetry as a vocation, so to speak. I think that for me, personally, it encouraged complacency. There is something quite dangerous about the immediacy of feedback and the tendency towards cliché that large audiences inspire. I enjoy elements of performance but I’m trying to let the page be the stage, and the words hold the spotlight.

What gives you pleasure when you write and read poetry?

I think all good writing is in pursuit of a definition of what it means to be human. When I can understand that, read that, or write something that makes me feel like maybe we’re all the same, and maybe that’s beautiful, that’s where I find the pleasure in it all.

Do you write in any other genre? Why poetry?

I have a particular penchant for creative non-fiction (which any fiction I ostensibly write actually also is, if I’m honest). I’ve had a lot of strange and challenging things happen to me or around me, sometimes by accident, sometimes by choice. I think as a writer it’s almost a good thing to have a rather difficult life, because it fuels your work. It gives you stories to tell. And I enjoy the intellectual aspect of creative non-fiction, as it allows me to incorporate my readings and discussions into less of an experience, and more of a comment. It challenges me to be a little more perceptive and to think deeply, which I value.

But poetry, to me, is the closest thing I have to prayer. I wish I could say something profound about why I write poetry, but I do it because it doesn’t feel right not to. It’s a discipline: I have to put my poetry hat on daily to ensure that I am training my brain into accessing that other place that some people call a muse. But it comes, and I let it come, because it’s who I am. I wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t been introduced to poetry at such an early age, and instructed in it all through my schooling. I like to think I would have written poetry anyway.

Finally if you were to be trapped for hours (in a waiting room, on a mountain, inside on a rainy day) what poetry book would you read?

Probably Peter Bland’s Collected Poems. It’s a fairly hefty book, so it would keep me occupied, and his writing is so hopeful, somehow, that whatever drab place I might be trapped in would become gently infused with the magic of the every day.

Kirsti on YouTube

1. Albert Wendt

 Just finished reading Coconut Milk by Dan Taulapapa McMullin (University of Arizona Press).

A beguiling collection: the poems are open, innovative, humourous, and compassionate.

Also Afakasi Speaks by Grace Taylor (Ala Press, Hawaii, 2013).

Vigorous, honest, energetic poetry that wraps you up in its arms and carries you along into complex emotional depths and tensions.

Albert Wendt is one of most New Zealand’s most treasured writers, in both poetry and fiction.

2. Caoilinn Hughes

Bevel by William Letford (Carcanet Press, 2012)

The marketing of this book draws attention to the fact that young Scotsman Letford is a roofer by day. Although that might seem like a bit of a cute hook, the language, labour and sense of humour of being a roofer are central to the tone of Bevel: Letford is just that bit closer than the rest of us to the sky and, though he might be physically kept in his place by the hammers, nails and vernacular of the tradesman culture, he is imaginatively and creatively unobstructed, uplifting. What’s more, the novelty of a roofer-poet is topped by the novelty of the poems. The writing is so rivetingly different! The poems engage in witty repartee with one another and relate a refreshing, funny, honest, sometimes cheeky perspective. I love this book, and have read it a half-dozen times. I subject non-poetry enthusiast friends to recitations from it because he is a poet who, through sheer joy, novelty and humanity—and despite his use of Scottish phonetics throughout—translates. He’s worth checking out on YouTube too, as his performances do justice to the poems. This is my favourite:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyHWqdIEtb0

Graft by Helen Heath (Victoria University Press, 2013)

Graft is Helen Heath’s debut collection of poetry, and it was the first book of poetry to be shortlisted for the Royal Society of New Zealand’s science prize in 2013. It’s a bit like cronyism to rave about this book (as we happen to be in the same university and share a publisher!), but when I think of poetry books that I really enjoyed over the past couple of years, Graft is definitely up there. The prize nomination is a result of the book’s strong interest in science, as Heath’s parents were scientists and it informs her philosophies, but I recall the relationships portrayed most distinctly. The interactions between people; the meeting points between ideologies. What stands out in this book is the poet’s generosity: Heath lets the reader in, and rewards her—by no means a given in the genre. These poems are accessible, while being finely crafted and finished.

Caoilinn Hughes’ debut collection Gathering Evidence was recently published by Victoria University Press. My review here. You can see her at the Auckland Writer’s Festival on Saturday May 17^th 2.30 pm – 3.20 pm in Matters Of Discovery.

3. Amy Brown

Ephemeral Waters, Kate Middleton (Giramondo, 2013)

Kate Middleton is a brilliantly talented young Australian poet, whose recent book (what I would call a contemporary epic poem) took her the length of the Colorado River. What I most enjoy about this book-length meditation, complete with its own tributaries and dams, is its brazen ambition and generosity of attention. In an essay about the writing of Ephemeral Waters, Middleton says, “At a distance, even after the task is done, my faith that the impressions could add up to the poem seems crazy . . . writing this poem has taught me to try impossible things. I wonder, should a long poem always develop with the suspicion that it is unpublishable? Did Ephemeral Waters teach me that I should only try impossible things?” I find this sentiment especially resonant and inspiring.

Phosphorescence of Thought, Peter O’Leary (Cultural Society, 2013)

I confess that Phosphorescence of Thought is still on my bedside table, having just arrived from the U.S. late last week. I wanted to mention it, though, because I have been looking forward to reading it even since Joan Fleming recommended it on this blog last year. As another contemporary epic poem, with enormous empathy for a specific physical environment, I think it will follow nicely from Ephemeral Waters. In a few months I’ll be visiting Chicago, where O’Leary lives, and am tempted to go to Des Plaines, which features in the poem.

Autobiography of a Marguerite, Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle (Hue & Cry Press, May 2014)

It may seem nepotistic to list here a book that I have edited, but in honesty it is the poetry that I have been most struck by so far this year. Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle’s Autobiography of a Marguerite (another book-length poem) is a unique and indelible reading experience. In its adventurous structure and raw openness, it is comparable to Anne Carson’s Decreation and Beauty of the Husband. If I hadn’t been lucky enough to spend the last few months reading Zarah’s debut, I would be eagerly anticipating its launch this May.

Amy Brown has a cluster of poems in the latest issue of Sport (42) that I love—richly detailed, poignant, evocative. I particularly love ‘Names.’

4. Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle

 Anamnesis, Lucy Ives (Slope Editions, 2009)

I’ve been coming back to this book-length poem since late 2012. The poem uses the repetition of imperatives “Write” and “Cross this out”, inviting the reader to participate in the process of writing the poem. The enactment of revision becomes the poem.

What you did was wrong

Cross this out

What you did was right

You can write again about the tiger that fed itself

A great mystery

The owl that stepped forward one step

Cross out “tiger,” write, “present”

It goes on the cover of another book

What are you so depressed about?

Cross this out

Poemland, Chelsey Minnis (Wave Books, 2009)

This is a book-length poem about writing poems, what a poem is, and what it means to be a poet. There are lots of similes, over-the-top metaphors and exclamation marks as the poem addresses the reader directly, seeming to be sincere and ironic at the same time.

This is supposed to be an independent thought…

But it is just a strained leash…

This is a poem!

You should be able to figure it out alright…

The first theme of it is “old fashioned drinking”…

Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle’s debut collection, Autobiography of a Marguerite, will be published by Hue & Cry Press. This book is being funded through a Pledge Me request. You can pledge here (ends 6^th April 14 at 7pm).

I am delighted to post this news and media release. Graham Beattie and Carole Beu are such dedicated supporters of New Zealand books, literary events and authors.

We are very excited about a new book show on NZ television; and we need your help to make it happen!

Graham Beattie and Carole Beu are collaborating with us, local TV broadcaster, Face TV, to produce and screen THE BOOK SHOW later this year. It will be nationwide and available on Sky TV 83, as well as online.  The weekly programme will feature author interviews, reviews and great reads from both NZ contributors and visiting international book people; presented by Carole and Graham.

We’re making use of the ‘boosted’ crowd-funding website (www.boosted.org.nz)  to raise money to make it happen – and will launch our campaign at the beginning of May: online and at a special event at the Women’s Bookshop.

So, all through May, you can make a tax-deductable donation of any amount over $5 by going to the boosted website, which is run as part of the NZ Arts Foundation.
Watch this space for updates and go online to help out in May!

Deb Faith
PRODUCER| FACE TELEVISION phone + 64  (0) 9 376 5030 Ddi  +64 (0) 9 360 4613
mobile + 64 (0) 27 489 0213
mail address  PO BOX 78-034, GREY LYNN, AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND 1245
street address  28 SURREY CRESCENT, GREY LYNN, AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND 1021
email deb@facetv.co.nz

Bringing you the best in public service broadcasting Sky Channel 083

Thanks to Victoria University Press, Jack McKerchar will receive a copy of Marty Smith‘s terrific Horse with a Hat.

My review: https://nzpoetryshelf.com/2014/03/20/marty-smiths-horse-with-a-hat-you-get-grit-and-you-get-open-views/

For this issue JAAM is shifting south, and are delighted that Dunedinite Sue Wootton is our guest editor for our 2014 issue. Sue is probably best known as a poet – she has published three collections of poetry, most recently By Birdlight (Steele Roberts, 2011), and has won awards for her poems. But she’s also an experienced prose writer. Her ebook of three short stories, The Happiest Music on Earth, was published in 2012 and her children’s book, Cloudcatcher, came out in 2010. Sue has twice been a runner up in the BNZ Katherine Mansfield short story awards, has been a finalist in the Sunday Star Times and Royal Society of New Zealand Manhire Prize short story competitions, and has won the Aoraki Literary Festival short story prize.

The theme for JAAM 32 is ‘shorelines’, and Sue welcomes submissions that consider this theme from any angle, loosely, or not at all.

JAAM publishes poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, essays, photography and other artwork. Please don’t send simultaneous submissions, more than six poems or more than three prose submissions.

JAAM prefers emailed submissions. Send to jaammagazine@yahoo.co.nz, using ‘JAAM submission’ (or similar) in your subject line, so we know it’s not spam. Include your submission(s) in the body of your email. If you have particular formatting, you can also include your submissions in an attachment (.doc, .rtf, .pdf or any image file type is ok for images).

If you don’t have email, you can post submissions to:

JAAM
PO Box 25239
Wellington 6146
New Zealand

Make sure you include a stamped self-addressed envelope for reply.

The deadline for submissions is 31 March 2014, and JAAM 32 will be published in or around September 2014.

JAAM here

Three Poets – an evening of poetry reading

Happy summer holidays — may you all find a poetry book in your Christmas stocking or summer beach bag!

Poetry Shelf invited poets and fans of poetry to contribute the names of books they have loved reading in the past year from any time and from any place. The list is such a celebration of poetry, it might just become an annual event! Thanks to everyone who took time to write back. The list has certainly sent me on the hunt for books that caught my eye, but it also reminded me of the terrific range of local books published. I loved the idea of finding the right poetry book for a particular occasion (Amy Brown’s pick when going to the hairdressers). And I was delighted to see two children’s books made the list. This should be it now!

Time to get my summer bag of books and start reading.

The List of Poetry Books That Hooked Us in 2013

Angela Andrews: A friend has recently lent me her copy of Marie Howe’s What the Living Do. Marie Howe had somehow passed me by. Her poetry is superb. What the Living Do was written after the death of her brother, and is a book that manages to be an intimate, expansive, beautiful, startling, meditative page-turner. It is a stunning collection. I particularly like the fact “my” copy has a thin, faded brown spine, but the cover – which has sat against other books on the shelf in the sun – is a deep bronze. Thank you, Anna! (I will give it back.)

Serie Barford: 1. night swimming, Kiri Piahana-Wong (Anahera Press, 2013) There are so many lovely lines where worlds merge and understanding of self/consciousness deepens. For example, from ‘This is it’:

‘the clouds

glacing the sky capture

your attention, and you

realise, with a start, that

this is it, this is

the shape of your life.’

2. Dark Sparring Selina Tusitala Marsh (AUP, 2013) ‘The Day Amy Died’ — I like this poem because I remember exactly where I was when Amy Winehouse died. I was briefly living on Ile des Pins, an island that’s part of New Caledonia, and had walked through the bush and found an amazing hotel where I pretended to be a rich tourist for an hour or so. As I exited the hotel I heard Amy’s death announced in French on the big TV screen in the foyer. I’d been writing about Lady Day and felt both grateful and sad for these women’s lives.

‘The day Amy died

was day 89 of my sister’s sobriety

and there was wine in the house no more.’

3. Afakasi Speaks, Grace Taylor (ala Press, 2013) I like this poem because Grace observes the connection between worlds (like Kiri and Selina) in a way that’s consistent with the Samoan notion of teu le va. Seen and unseen worlds/intelligences/spirits are connected because there’s no such thing as empty space. Here in ‘Gift’ she links the world’s inside and outside of her womb.

‘He scarred her before he was even born

stretched her belly into a universe

until there was no elasticity left

carving pink shiny valleys’

Airini Beautrais: I really loved Rachel O’Neill’s book One Human in Height which came out from Hue and Cry Press in October 2013. Rachel’s prose poems are entertaining, intriguing, and well-crafted.

Diana Bridge: I will venture one name, though his books are not available in our shops. This is that of Gabriel Levin, born in France, educated in the States and resident in Jerusalem for forty years. Gabriel and I have written to each other for a decade, but not yet met. He is a translator from Hebrew, French and Arabic and co-founder of a press, Ibis Editions, which translates into English the languages of the Levant region: Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, French, drawing together and in this way promoting a relationship between literatures that are often kept apart. Gabriel’s fourth volume of poetry, published, as each of his others, by Anvil, in 2012, is To These Dark Steps.

This book is staggeringly good: deeply intelligent, passionately committed to its topics, down to earth and beautiful. The different grounds of a Levant that is both geographically and imaginatively defined, illumine each other in subtle and intricate ways. Human and historic scales interlock and the overriding concerns of this ancient troubled region are stated with urgency, formal diversity and, in poem after poem, real lyric beauty.

Fergus Barrowman:  My two favourite local books published by others are Ian Wedde, The Lifeguard and Maria McMillan, The Rope Walk; my two favourite furriners are Mary Ruefle, Trances of the Blast and Christopher Reid, Six Bad Poets. But there are SO many contenders.

Amy Brown: I have read Magnificent Moon several times this year – the first was while at the hairdresser, and I can recommend it as an ideal book for this situation. Ashleigh’s shrewd and candid observations are a foil for the superficiality of the offered magazines, her images a vivid distraction from the bleach’s scent and heat; this collection made me see my reflection differently when I looked up. Best of all was the sense of serendipity when I turned a page and found the poem ‘My hairdresser and my heart’. I covered the title with my hand, afraid my own hairdresser might be reading over my shoulder.

James Brown: I’m still really enjoying Magnificent Moon by Ashleigh Young (VUP)

Elizabeth Caffin: What I was thinking was to suggest three books I have been reading aloud to my mother, aged 97 today, who is now in a rest home (in a dementia unit). They are published by BBC Books: The Nation’s Favourite Poems and The Nation’s Favourite Twentieth Century Poems, both edited by Griff Rhys Jones; and The Nation’s Favourite Love Poems edited by Daisy Goodwin. Her memory for most things is terrible but she can still recite with me ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’  or ‘Miss J. Hunter Dunn, Miss J. Hunter Dunn’ and she has even learned a few short Wendy Cope poems (‘The flowers I nearly bought you/Have lasted all this while!’). Rhythm, rhyme and humour aka poetry have lasted all this while.

Janet Charman: A friend sent me this poem by Sadiqa De Meijer and its been haunting my imagination so I have requested her prize winning collection, in which it appears, from the library. But as there’s no sign of it yet I may just have to buy it for myself for Christmas. Here is the first stanza:

‘Pastorals in the Atrium’

The tour has only started when

I’m ambushed by that flat-lined verdigris I’d know even

as a stumbling sleepwalker: landschap

with tin river, cleaver of sodden pastures —

Sadiqa de Meijer’s first book of poems is Leaving Howe Island (Oolichan Books, 2013). A portion of the manuscript won the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012. She lives with her family in Kingston, Ontario. A longer selection of her poems (from which Pastorals in the Atrium above was pasted) can be read at: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/sadiqa-de-meijer

Jen Crawford: Two very lovely books I’ve spent time with this year have been Hello, The Roses, by US poet Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, and the long-awaited Collected Poems of Arthur Yap. Berssenbrugge’s marvelously fractal cycle of poems questions the borders of consciousness and will in humans, plants and our shared surroundings. The individual sentences often feel still and restful, but there’s a huge dynamism in the way the poems take in the aesthetic, the scientific and the philosophical. Arthur Yap (1943-2006) was a Singapore poet who published five collections in the 1970s and 80s. His fascinating body of work was shaped by his sensibilities as a doctor of linguistics and an abstract painter – words, colours and images as elements of composition are exquisitely balanced. The Collected Poems also treats the reader to reproductions of the original volumes’ vintage covers, painted by Yap. So the book’s a really interesting immersion in a particular time and place.

Kathleen Crookenden: My favourite poetry book for 2013 is Clare and Michael Morpurgo’s Where My Wellies Take Me which, while published in 2012, I only discovered this year. It blends art and storytelling to present the Morpurgo’s favourite poems in a way that makes you bumping into friends, old and new, on a ramble through the English countryside. The story and art (provided by Olivia Lomenech Gill) follow a young girl on a walk near her village, with the things she sees along the way providing links into the poems. The poems themselves range from the famous (e.g. Walter de la Mare’s ‘The Listeners’) to nursery rhymes to many I had not read before, and are from mainly English, Irish and American writers. It is my favourite poetry book for this year, not just because it a good collection of some of my favourite poems, but also because it is such a beautiful book to look at and read. More books like these please! I have also found myself wondering off and on about what a New Zealand version of this book would look like (a bush walk rather than farm walk?) and what poems it would include (Glover’s ‘The Magpies’? Baxter’s ‘High Country Weather’? Tuwhare’s ‘Reign Again’?). It would make a good gift for children you know – or perhaps your inner child – especially if they have a fondness for nature, poetry and fold out maps. Proceeds from the book support the Morpurgo’s charity, Farms for City Children.

Lynn Davidson: Family Songbook by John Newton The land’s surface; its beauties and brutalities, and the way we go back to the same landscape physically or with pen or brush (the cover is Toss Woollaston’s ‘Landscape 19’) half-believing it has something intangible to give; these are the territories of John Newton’s Family Songbook that make it a standout book for me. It rings out and it rings true: ‘…its vein of blue water/ so full of nothing you could spend a life trying to drink/ from it.’

Nigh-No-Place by Jen Hadfield I heard Jen Hadfield read at the Edinburgh Book Festival this year. She’s young and original and has lived for the past few years on the Shetland Islands. Her book Nigh-No-Place is fresh, exciting and generally rather brilliant; it has a draft-horse reciting the Lord’s Prayer: ‘Paternoster. Paternoster./ Hallowed be dy mane./ Dy kingdom come./Dy draftwork be done.’

Doc Drumheller: A poetry book I have enjoyed this year is: Packing a Bag for Mars, by James Norcliffe. What I love about the book is firstly the poetry. James is a master of making ordinary life seem extraordinary, and is also very good at bringing fantasy back down to earth. One poem that is a good example of writing about real life is a poem called ‘The Attack on Baghdad.’ James uses an analogy for the wasps greedily eating peaches in his backyard to illustrate the horrors of war, but he never mentions anything about war in the poem, only the title helps to direct the reader. The title poem: ‘Packing a Bag for Mars,’ shows how fantasy can link back to reality; most of the things he takes are quite practical and in the end he decides he will need to take a friend in case he gets lonely. The second thing I love about this book is, as a teacher for the School for Young Writers, it is a valuable resource for writing — with each poem there is a ‘try this example’ to get started on a new poem. James has also been generous to give insight on how to craft and redraft poems and has included notes and definitions of some tricky words. There are also some very cool illustrations by Jenny Cooper.

Murray Edmond: Lisa Samuels, Anti M (Tucson, Chax Press, 2013)  A powerful creative memoir of omitted prose; short enough to be read in a single sitting, a mind-boggling experience (try it out loud) which I recommend. As you read, you will wonder, but you will also read with wonder. It is “live.” It does say to you: “live!”

Richard von Sturmer, Book of Equanimity Verses (Auckland: Puriri Press, 2013) For this new book, a ghostly palimpsest of the 12C Chinese compilation by Hongzhi of 100 Zen koans called The Book of Equanimity, Richard von Sturmer has invented a new verse form: the text consists of 100 eight line poems. The journey from poem to poem is an improvised dance – hop jump skip pause turn run.

Jo Emeney: Wild Like Me, Elizabeth Nannestad, Victoria University Press Published seventeen years after Nannestad’s last collection, Wild Like Me has a number of recognisable traits that made her one of our most popularly anthologised writers of the nineties—a deft, quick, fairy-light touch on the page; an idiosyncratic, demotic voice that is discernibly feminine and Kiwi; the ability to write good short poems.

She also has some new tricks at fifty-seven, and thematic preoccupations that range away from love and family relationships, the subjects of her first two books. The poems in this collection are predominantly nature poems that focus on the ways in which humans and creatures observe each other at close quarters. They have an oriental influence to a degree, but also the influence of a lifetime’s reading and self-education.

Nannestad is a miniaturist and a person who looks for tenderness in the diurnal—and who usually finds it. She has also become a playwright in the years between poetry books, and it shows in the fine-tuning of the pathos-humour boundary that she treads so well in these new poems. This is a great book for those who would like to re/discover the Greta Garbo of New Zealand poetry.

The Yellow Buoy C. K. Stead AUP This is a collection replete with cats, heart and naughtiness. It is what many collections fail to be: memorable. I can remember things about it without having to go back to the book to check. My favourite name in the book, without a doubt, belongs to the seemingly indomitable fish, Carp Diem. The poem I recall most vividly is ‘The Dream,’ which re-imagines a mother’s passing as it should have been, and tells it so convincingly that it takes on the comforting quality of a bedtime story, which, in essence, it becomes: a narrative created to bring ease or rest to the mind, when the real story is unacceptable.

Many reviewers read Stead’s 2013 collection as elegiac when it came out in February—there is a touching poem about ‘The Old’ and all the deaths they encounter among friends; another in memory of Curnow, the ‘w’ now missing from his Kauri Rd post box, for example. However, I read the collection as extremely life-affirming. Defiantly so. Like the octogenarian poet swimming out to the Kohimarama buoy and back, in fine form.

Fiona Farrell: I think it would be Sarah Broome, Gleam (AUP), which we read from on Tuesday as a memorial tribute from the Poets’ Collective. So sad and so deeply powerful.

Laurence Fearnley: For the past year or so I’ve been driving myself nuts trying to remember the name of the poem or the author of a work I read at university – back in the 80s when I was doing American Studies. I have an image in my head of how the poem ends: a crouching figure eating something raw and bloody – but my memory might not be accurate. I decided the poet must be Hart Crane so I bought HART CRANE – poems selected by Maurice Riordan (Faber and Faber). I couldn’t find my poem in it but it’s money well spent all the same.

Joan Fleming: One Human in Height, Rachel O’Neill (Hue & Cry, 2013). Unnerving, slantly musical, and very gently devastating, these prose poems clip surreality to miniature autobiography in sequences that leave you quickened but never sated, thank goodness.

Phosphorescence of Thought, Peter O’Leary (The Cultural Society, 2013, US). The awe and ache of incredibly lush language vivifies the religious throb and environmental grief of this book-length poem. An absolutely stunning achievement.

Kelvin Fowler: Sarah Jane Barnett’s A Man Runs Into a Woman. Okay this was a fantastic must-read. I had read a lot of reviews of this book, however nothing prepared me for the short, punchy and wonderful poems/pieces/paragraphs, such as ‘Bees’ or ‘Voices’. I also especially liked ‘Marathon Men’ and enjoyed the ‘death-row’ stuff.

Janis Freegard: Anne Kennedy’s The Darling North (AUP, 2012) is a collection of longer poems on topics that range from an extended love poem:

“His puku

He’s fond of it and gives it treats, so it has grown up to be affectionate.

There’s a heart in there,

Not a heart, a centre.”

to reworked nursery rhymes with delicious language:  “Hey ho sweetsour blittymeat. Hey ho flapskillet spittyfat.”

Jackie Kay was a highlight for me of this year’s Auckland Writers and Readers Festival.  Her collection ‘Fiere’ (Picador, 2011) includes poems in the Scottish dialect:

“O’er a lifetime, my fiere, my bonnie lassie,

I’d defend you – you, me ; blithe and blatter,

here we gang doon the hill, nae matter…”

and poems that explore her discovery of the Nigerian side of her heritage:

“The country holds out its own brown hands,

The lake allows me to draw some water.”

Rhian Gallagher: Sarah Broom’s Tigers at Awhitu is a collection I continue to re-read. Her second collection Gleam, published posthumously, is her courageous reply to death. Amy Clampitt wrote: ‘Nobody is ever ready for the feel of the raw edge/between being and nothing’. It’s this raw edge that Broom illuminates for us. I have no idea how she managed to write these poems. What a gift.

The Overhaul by Kathleen Jamie – Jamie is an alert, perceptive observer amid the rush and messiness of daily life. She writes with economy, clarity and lyrical directness. The Overhaul is a mid-life book – the poems achieve a wonderful balance between the groundswell of memory and the vividly enacted present.

The Master and the Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World by Iain McGilchrist. I would put this book on any recommended reading list (whatever the course!). ‘The kind of attention we pay actually alters the world: we are, literally, partners in creation.’ This would have to be a favourite read of the year.

Bernadette Hall:

One poetry book I have loved this year is a novel. It’s The Big Music by Kirsty Gunn. I call it poetry when words move as she makes them move, when they create a unique fabric and new ways of seeing. The whole may be imperfect but I remain totally hooked.

Siobhan Harvey: Sarah Broom, Gleam (Auckland University Press) uses the vibrancy of the natural world to voice a stellar meditation upon life questions and uncertainties – existence, living with illness, the engagement of offspring.

Fleur Adcock, Glass Wings (Victoria University Press/ Bloodaxe) offers a wonderfully rich poetic journey through the author’s ancestral past and historic connection to all manner of creepers and crawlers.

Amy Brown, The Odour of Sanctity (Victoria University Press) is a meaty, imaginative discourse upon sainthood, offering a range of historical figures (often women) for poetic and religious holiness.

Anything which American poet, Billy Collins produces makes my favourite books list, and his latest, Aimless Love – New and Selected (Picador) is no different – 50 new poems and a smattering of well recognised verse about love, loss and celebration.

George Szirtes’ Bad Machine (Bloodaxe) is a deep oration, part personal, part political about the dysfunctions of all things mechanical, from the corpus to the use of language.

Jeffrey Paproa Holman: The Family Songbook, by John Newton (Victoria University Press, 2013), 48pp. $25.00.

John Newton’s latest collection ranges across time and space in a range of voices that capture a youth spent on the rural fringes of the South Island, bringing alive people and places: Beavertown in the Wairau Valley, Dunsandel in Canterbury, Stillwater and Dobson. Barry Crump makes an appearance, as does Toss Woollaston as the Grey Valley Rawleighs’ man (in one of the great West Coast poems, IMHO). Virtuoso stuff from a writer who gets better the more he produces.

Anna Jackson: Amy Brown’s The Odour of Sanctity. (VUP) I loved it from the moment I read the contents page which is itself a very formally composed poem. Like Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries, this is a book arranged on structural principles, with interlocking parts; it also covers a huge historical range by focusing on a cast of select characters: it should win the Booker prize for poetry.

Maria Macmillan’s The Rope Walk. A beautifully constructed book published by Seraph Press, every book hand-made, with an original lino-cut print. This too is a book full of history, stories of early settler life set against stories from the more recent past. The characters are vividly alive, the stories resonant, the language lovely.

Fiona Kidman: Us, then by Vincent O’Sullivan (VUP) is the book that has soared for me this year. There is a reason he is the new Poet Laureate; he is simply the sharpest, most readable and most informed poet in the country. By informed, I mean that he steps far enough back from himself to see the world in all it’s hues and nuances and to truly hear the voices of New Zealanders, and turn that world into poetry. ‘Nowhere further from Belgium’ is one of the most achingly beautiful poems I have read in a long time.

Bill Manhire: Two books I’m enjoying at this very moment: August Kleinzahler’s latest, The Hotel Oneira, and Michael Hofmann’s versions of Gottfried Benn, Impromptus. Both of them have soft hearts as well as tough minds. Plus I’ve been re-reading Seamus Heaney, and am surprised to be reminded how much his early book Wintering Out means to me.

Robyn Marsack: I mourn the loss of Sarah Broom, and cherish her last book, Gleam (AUP). Three books that have excited me this year are hard to categorise, thus risky for publishers. Kathleen Jamie’s moving collaboration with artist Brigid Collins, Frissure (Polygon), leads by line and image ‘back from fear and loss into the beautiful world’. Lake Superior is a poem by the marvellous Lorine Niedecker, printed alongside her journal, some letters and other documents – almost a biography of a poem, published with severe elegance by Wave Books. J.O. Morgan’s At Maldon (CB Editions) revisits the early English battle poem and re-casts it in startling form. Hooray for small presses!

Emma Neale: I’d name The Rope Walk by Maria McMillan (Seraph Press); for its ability to skim from distant history to the recent past with barely a pocket of turbulence between; for its enjoyment of Scots dialect so sensuous that it seems single words have texture, taste, heat and light. She has pared and honed the line to such a slim thing: an aesthetic of verbal simplicity yet psychological density.

But the collection that has had the biggest and still slow-burning effect is one published in 2012: expatriate American Jack Gilbert’s Collected Poems. The New York Times called it “a monument to an aesthetic off the grid” – both for its frequent imagery drawn from rural Greek life, and its unfashionable romanticism. It uses the ironies of language but not irony as a defensive stance, a failure to commit to a belief or point of view, or a poetic mask to hide behind. It’s gruellingly honest about the dishonourable aspects of character, the drives and lusts behind the veneer of civil social relations. And there are some rending elegies to his Japanese wife, Michiko, dead at 36: a sense of music’s unresolved chords pitches through the air; the grief is palpable.

John Newton: For a book I’ve loved: Ian Wedde, The Lifeguard. An easy choice — when Ian’s in this form it reminds you what the game’s all about. If any one hasn’t seen this book yet, check out the poem for Harry Martens.

Discovery of the year, better late than never, Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul Whip. Canadian, language-y, just this side of lucidity. Robertson’s vocab makes me want to marry her.

Nevena Nikolic, Book Buyer, Time Out Bookstore: In many ways it has been a standout year for NZ Poetry, particularly from the University Presses. Two of my favourites have to be the beautiful Selina Tusitala Marsh’s Dark Sparring (isn’t she amazing to see live?). A mirror image in many ways of my other favourite, Sarah Broom’s Gleam. Both volumes deal with cancer and mortality. Both confront death through the solace of poetry and pulse with life. Not mournful but nourishing for the soul.

‘are you in pain?

are you still breathing?

are we going to get through this?’

from ‘Noose,’ Dark Sparring, p.64

‘everything

will

be

OK

and anyway

I’ve got you

here

right

now’

from ‘small,’ Gleam, p.31

James Norcliffe: First off, Elisabeth Smither’s The Blue Coat – vintage wine, just lovely; second Bernadette Hall’s Life & Customs – perfectly pitched and wry and wise as ever; finally Sarah Broom’s Gleam — elemental, brave, stunning.

Rachel O’Neill: Therese Lloyd’s Other Animals (Victoria University Press, 2013) dismantles opposites like ‘mind’ and ‘body’ and offers something like visceral thought and pristine lyrics that still harbour an animal inside. With voices saying ‘yes to the wrong questions’, and observations of windows ‘greasy with salt’, this is a collection that lives the life of fire and tigers, rest and protest.

Vivienne Plumb: During 2013 I’ve read more plays than poetry, while I worked with Michelanne Forster on ‘Twenty New Zealand Playwrights’ – a collection of twenty interviews that’s just been launched by Playmarket N.Z., who are the publishers. My picks for poetry I read this year: Brown Girls in Bright Red Lipstick, Courtney Sina Meredith’s sassy, melodic lush life poetry collection (Beatnik Publishing); and the Australian Lesley Lebkowicz’s gripping verse novel The Petrov Poems (pittstreetpoetry.com). The big synchronistic surprise of the year was when I borrowed Courtney’s book from the library and found an old check-out ticket inside – and hey, someone had been reading not only Courtney’s book but also my poetry collection Crumple, so someone’s reading Kiwi poetry, and we love ya for it!

Chris Price: Mary Ruefle has kept me astonished since her brilliant reading in Wellington this year  –  her Selected Poems are endlessly enlivening (but how is it done?). The book I’m currently enjoying is Lucie Brock–Broido’s elegant Stay, Illusion (which also has one of the most beautiful covers I’ve seen).

New Zealand poet Elizabeth Nannestad publishes one volume a decade, but they’re worth the wait.  This decade’s book, Wild Like Me, is like water from a mountain stream – bracing and refreshing.

Helen Rickerby: I think people should totally be able to nominate your book! It was certainly one of my favourites of the year, along with The Rope Walk, but as the publisher of both I’m obviously very biased. I’ve been mostly having a novel and non-fiction year I think, but probably my other favourite poetry book of the year would be Rachel O’Neill’s One Human in Height.

Oh, but also, Kate Camp’s Snow White’s Coffin. How could I forget! It was such a chewy book. A lot to get my teeth into, and it needed a bit of a mull too. And I would like to have said Red Doc by Anne Carson, but for an unfathomable reason, I started it while I was away for the weekend, only got half way and haven’t picked it up again. I was enjoying it too.

Jack Ross: Purdy, Al, & Sam Solecki, ed. Beyond Remembering: The Collected Poems of Al Purdy. 2000. Madeira Park, BC, Canada: Harbour Publishing, 2001. I picked it up in Jason Books, and have really enjoyed getting to know this very interesting man Al Purdy. Another Canadian poet said of him: “the Emperor has no clothes” — I disagree. To me he seems like a kind of a strange cross between Raymond Carver and James K. Baxter.

Morrin Rout: I want to mention several poets that I’ve had the pleasure of reading this year and I’m going to be unashamedly partisan as several are from the Hagley Writers’ Institute where I am the Director. First is Bernadette Hall, our Patron, whose new collection, Life and Customs, is a sheer delight – full of sly humour, dancing rhythms and clever observations. Then there is Marie McGuigan who has just won the Margaret Mahy award for the best portfolio at the Writers’ Institute – she will be a poet to watch out for. Her work really sang to us and shows great promise. And the wonderful Kerrin P Sharpe who tutors at the Institute – she wrote a poem for me when my old canine companion of 17 years, Jacko, died not long ago – you can read it in our new online journal, The Quick Brown Dog, http://journal.hagleywriters.net/?p=151. It’s such a privilege to have a poem written for you and it says so well things I never could. Finally I just have to mention a delightful collection hand-delivered to me this week by my neighbour, Roger Hickin of Cold Hub Press. It’s Ruby Duby Do, a perfectly formed little book of poems celebrating grandmotherhood and the endless joy of a little granddaughter. It has a scattering of watercolours by Kathryn Madill, one of my favourite artists, which complements the text with their delicate, almost ephemeral lines.

Lisa Samuels: Bill Griffiths, A Book of Spilt Cities (Etruscan 1999): line-love, eye-dialect, exhortations, and social engagement on large pages: e.g. ‘they are parading and are unblithe perpets / the vixen in the wet-black-wood / of Noel’

Stacy Doris, Fledge, a Phenomenology of Spirit (Nightboat 2012): six-syllable lines ‘to push musicality-duration and naively literalize nonduality’: e.g. ‘you as a state of touch / for demolished, to laugh / face to face puzzling / solidity I bang / your head as merriment’. This is Stacy’s last book.

Txus García, Poesía Para Niñas Bien / Tits in my bowl, graphics by Cisco Bellabestia (Cangrejo Pistolero 2011). A strong book, bared feminism: e.g. across from ‘TocToca’ and its typewriterly ‘y’s and smudged red paint is ‘Animal de ternura’: ‘No te lo pienso decir, / lo tendrás que adivinar.’

aodán mccardle, IS ing (Veer Books 2011): transcriptions from performances, CD included, very present and open, e.g. ‘we wrent if in space of energy some surface’ and ‘belonging to has yet a risk more after the world wars I’m not sure’

Ila Selwyn: I’d put Poetry NZ 47, edited by Alistair Paterson, at the top of my list as it has a wide variety of interesting poems. Reading the poems inspired me to write four new poems after being in the doldrums for several weeks. In fact I’d recommend reading a lot of the back copies as well.

Another one I’d recommend is Kiri Piahana-Wong’s night swimming, which is full of beautiful images, such as ‘Night /sinks into /the bones   The cliff face /looks weary.   the new year /opens its arms before me.’

And I definitely would recommend The Baker’s Thumbprint.

Iain Sharp: I think it’s been a pretty strong year for local poetry with The Baker’s Thumbprint, The Lifeguard, The Odour of Sanctity, Family Songbook, Snow White’s Coffin, The Blue Coat et al. Because I was having so much trouble choosing between them, I’ve decided to take another route and opt instead for an English book that has given me pleasure in the last week. Here goes:

My Christmas present to myself, Christopher Reid’s book-length poem Six Bad Poets (Faber & Faber, $30) reads like a compressed novel satirising a ghastly crew of London-based literary careerists. Reid’s seemingly off-the-cuff conversational manner masks a formidable technique whereby the poem divides into six suites, each of which contains six poems, each of which consists of six stanzas, each of which is six-lined – the whole held together by cunning assonantal half-rhyme.

I’m looking forward to Sam Sampson’s new book in 2014 and perhaps we’ll get to see Michele’s edition of the collected Alan Brunton (which should be a knockout).

Kerrin P Sharpe: I very much enjoyed Life and Customs by Bernadette Hall. I loved its variety, surprises and the way it has folded itself around me.

Elizabeth Smither: Seamus Heaney’s death sent me back to re-reading his work, particularly Human Chain and Opened Ground: poems 1966-1996. I watched replays of his funeral service and delighted in his re-affirmation of love for his wife on his last ambulance ride and the last words he texted her: Noli timere. Heaney was (is) responsible for 2/3rds of all UK poetry sales: who will replace him to encourage people not to be afraid of poetry?

Roger Steele: Of the books we’ve published this year, one stand-out is Saradha Koirala’s Tear Water Tea. She’s often daring and always breathtaking; has even written some modern psalms.

A book at home I often like to pick up and open at random is Roger McGough’s Selected Poems; if I had to choose one word to describe him it’s be irreverent and funny. Okay, two words.

Richard von Sturmer Rilke’s Book of Hours, translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy (Berkley Publishing Group, 2005)

Although he had already published several collections of poetry, Rilke regarded The Book of Hours as his first enduring work. Part Russian icon painter and part cosmonaut of the soul, in this excellent translation by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy, Rilke illuminates the inner world with a poetic intensity that would later reach its full brilliance in the Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus.

Ruth Todd: In Life & Customs, Bernadette Hall goes back to her roots in Otago, with lots of different voices bringing the poems to life –often poignant & often with her wry wit. She is willing to take risks & so there are many surprises. Love this collection.

Chris Tse: I’d like to single out two poetry books that have tickled my brain and heart this year: Gleam by Sarah Broom, and Beauty Was the Case that They Gave Me by American poet Mark Leidner. Both books address the joys and complexities of everyday life with unique points of view. The images can be stark and confronting, but the unshakeable hope that grounds both books carries the reader into places of warmth and surprise.

Brian Turner: I bought Helen Heath’s Graft the other day. Lots of strong, sometimes poignant, poems about real things, things that matter. And Vincent O’Sullivan’s Us, then is impressive.

To me the best NZ poetry holds up very well alongside what’s written elsewhere, but elsewhere doesn’t know that. Probably never will.

Ian Wedde: This is a hard ask as I read a lot of poetry over the past 12 months or so. However a book I loved and admired greatly was the venerable David Ferry’s extraordinary Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations (University of Chicago Press, 2012). His poems always move with simple, modest finesse between and across translation and whatever might be called original let alone personal. It’s when Eurydice turns and goes back down into the dark in Ferry’s and our own time that what he’s called ‘furious clarity’ allows us to understand it’s his wife’s death he’s writing about. These are perhaps the least self-centred poems you’ll ever read, and yet they manage to be utterly forthright about the grief that has bewildered this poet.

Damien Wilkins: I discovered the astonishing fiction of Dermot Healy a few years ago and then went in search of everything he’d written. It turned out he was also a poet. My pick is his debut collection, The Ballyconnell Colours, from 1992. Healy, a lover of remote landscapes, birds, and brevity, is somewhere between Brian Turner and Geoff Cochrane. His terseness sometimes breaks into ecstatic longing or comic dialogues but mostly he works a deep vein of plain description: cliffs, houses, wings, dogs, beaches, pubs.

Sue Wootton: Vincent O’Sullivan’s Us, then (VUP 2013). A collection firmly grounded in life on Earth, but untethered always to the ineffable, thought-provoking, rib-tickling, spirit-warming and musical.