Description
Book SynopsisRelaunched under the editorship of Anna Jackson in 2019, AUP New Poets 6 includes substantial selections from the poetry of Ben Kemp, Vanessa Crofskey and Chris Stewart. We move from Kemp's slow-paced attentive readings of place and people, in a selection moving between Japan and New Zealand, to the velocity of Vanessa Crofskey's fierce, funny, intimate and political poetry, which takes the form of shopping lists, Post-it Notes, graphs, erasures, a passenger arrival card and even *poetry*, and finally to Chris Stewart's visceral take on the domestic, the nights cut to pieces by teething, the gravity of love and the churn of time. AUP New Poets 6 is an arresting introduction to the rich diversity of contemporary New Zealand poetry.
Trade ReviewIt is said that we are in the middle of a poetry revolution in New Zealand: there is certainly a lot of production, an eager climate of reception, and a sense that new cultural confidences and anxieties are finding new expression. It is a pleasure, then, to find a carefully chosen selection of new poets and new poems that show the rich diversity of the contemporary scene: from Ben Kemp entering 'the arteries of Tokyo . . . with ears open', to Vanessa Crofskey's barbed attention to the deceptions and oddities of our try-hard but not really multicultural society, to Chris Stewart's patient observations of family and childbirth. - Mark Williams
