Too many Draculas

Too many Draculas are coming down the road.
It’s sunset, they’re fixing their heads on right.
They need the deep, dark night. They need blood
on their teeth, they’re wondering who they’ll meet.
Maybe me, maybe you, maybe some brand new Draculas.
Here take this stake, and see how many
you can get. Pick them off one by one. Don’t give up yet,
you can always use the cross. Get the slow ones first,
they’re often weak from starving. They think
they’re ageless, but Jesus take a look!
Anaemic is surely the word that comes to mind.
Their posture is good, but frequently they trip.
That’s when you act. Find out where they feed.
Now you can watch whole sections of the city crumple.
So much rubble, so much blood. Also too many Draculas
these days writing poetry: they should stick
to screenplays. Also, too many Draculas getting library cards,
they take out all the books and never bring them back.
And now they’re putting pressure on our hospitals.
They flop and lie about, just picking at their food.
They dream all day of secret lairs and lonely paths.
It’s always hit or miss. They blow us all a kiss
then promise to unlock an age of economic bliss.
Too many Draculas, too many Draculas,
all climbing up the waiting list.

Bill Manhire

from Lyrical Ballads, Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2026

Too many Draculas

Last November, the National Library hosted ‘Laureates line up’, a poetry reading event featuring nearly all living New Zealand Poets Laureate.

During the evening, Bill Manhire read from his new book Lyrical Ballads which came out in February 2026. ‘I spend far too much time on social media’, he said, and mentioned a post about Dracula’s grave (or lack of) at a church in Whitby, before reading his poem “Too many Draculas”.  I didn’t follow the reference about why Dracula’s grave was (or wasn’t?) at Whitby (and why Whitby?) From a few puzzled looks around me, I thought others were equally mystified. 

Thinking about it later, I realised that it didn’t make sense because I hadn’t ever read Dracula, only Frankenstein – which has been the case with everyone I’ve mentioned this to; people think they’ve read Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) but they’re all thinking of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818).

So the first gift this poem gave me was the enjoyment of hearing Bill read it; the second was the unexpected pleasure of reading one of the classics for the first time, and the third was how it led me down so many fascinating rabbit holes (perhaps, a bit like Bill on social media). 

The story about how Bram Stoker came to be in Whitby and what inspired him his book is such an interesting insight into how creative imagination works, again, perhaps much like Bill’s, prompted by that social media post which could have been someone snapped a pic of the notice pinned to the door of St Mary’s Church in Whitby: ‘Please do not ask staff where Dracula’s grave is as there isn’t one. Thank you.’ 

I love the playfulness in this poem which seems both serious and not, and the way the end and internal rhymes lift and lighten it. The opening declaration (“Too many Draculas are coming down the road”) raises all sorts of questions: which road? Where are they going? How many Draculas is too many? The casual, almost flippant “Maybe me, maybe you”, five lines in, also makes us wonder who the narrator is addressing with their helpful and precise instructions about methods of approach: stakes, crosses and targeting the weaker ones first. I’m entertained by the way the narrator’s voice shifts at “Also… Also…” from its initial matter of fact tone to one that is more petulant, even whiny, the same complaint repeated five times: “too many Draculas”. 

“Also too many Draculas / these days writing poetry; they should stick / to screenplays”. Somehow you can read this declaration, treating these mythical beings as an accepted part of life, as both solid fact and weird non-nonsense simultaneously. The Draculas are muscling in on territory that isn’t theirs, taking up opportunities (poetry! library cards!) that the rest of us want for ourselves and simply not doing the right thing. (They take out too many books and don’t return them!) Perhaps Draculas are to blame for everything going wrong in our society, which might be a consoling thought – it‘s always good to have something or someone else to blame.  We think we know them from legend but who are they, really, the Draculas among us, making these wild gestures and promises? For a poem that seems so sure of itself, there are a lot of unanswered questions. By the final lines, the roaming vampires ( a word never used in the poem) have morphed from bloodthirsty and threatening creatures of the night to bumbling losers that ‘flop and lie about’, stuck on hospital waiting lists. 

Philippa Werry

This is a poem that is “delightfully weird” (as it says on the THWUP website about the whole collection) but somehow hard to stop thinking about.

How Dracula Came to Whitby page

Bram Stoker’s visit to Whitby 

The notice on the church door 

Poetry Shelf celebrates a Laureate evening

Bill Manhire (CNZM’)s latest book, Lyrical Ballads (2026). His books include Wow (2020), Some Things to Place in a Coffin (2017), Tell Me My Name (with Hannah Griffin and Norman Meehan, 2017) and The Stories of Bill Manhire (2015). He has won the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry five times, and was New Zealand’s inaugural Poet Laureate. He founded and directed the International Institute of Modern Letters at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington. He has edited major anthologies of New Zealand literature, including, with Marion McLeod, the now classic Some Other Country: New Zealand’s Best Short Stories (1984). In 2018 Manhire was awarded an Icon Award Whakamana Hiranga from the Arts Foundation.

Philippa Werry writes fiction, non-fiction, poetry and plays for children and young adults. Several of her books, both fiction and non-fiction, have been shortlisted for awards, including her verse novel Iris and Me, a fictional biography of writer Robin Hyde, which won the Young Adult section of the New Zealand NZ Book Awards for Children and Young Adults in 2023. Her most recent book is Degrees of Happy (Cuba Press, 2026).