There are so many books to catch up on now the PhD is done and dusted! But of the poetry I managed to read this year, these ones stayed with me. John Dennison’s Otherwise combines really fine crafting with breadth of vision and a deep interest in connectedness, including with other New Zealand writers. From ‘Lone Kauri (reprise)’: ‘So take for starters the surge-black fissure, / the waves which register the lunatic sense / it is all well beyond us.’

Lynn Jenner’s Lost and Gone Away brings us poetry in prose and the old world in the new: This from a reflection on the sculpture Rudderstone in the Wellington Botanic Gardens where amongst ‘Pacific’blue marble, there are ‘some small, irregularly shaped pieces of black…They are pieces of the Old World that came with us.’

Joan Fleming’s Failed Love Poems are energetically engaged with language and movement and the strange corners and shores of love that can hardly be articulated, but find articulation here: ‘Un-husbanded nuisance fire. Or grovel, or chisel down, chisel down’– from ‘The Invention of Enough.’

And finally the big excitement for me was a new book of poems by Kathleen Jamie, The Bonniest Company. This from ‘Arbour’:

…May is again pegged out

across the whole northern hemisphere, and today

is my birthday. Sudden hailstorms sting

this provisional asylum. We are not done yet.

Lynn Davidson