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AUP New Poets 12
By Zephyr Zhang, Loretta Riach and Anuja Mitra
Auckland University Press
Reviewed by Hamesh Wyatt
Auckland University Press regularly releases a volume of “new poets” to the world.
They are up to volume 12.
Anne Kennedy edits and introduces three young poets who each put together 25 pages, chapbook size, to show their breadth and depth of imagination.
All of them are very skilled and almost wink at the reader as they produce surprise after surprise.
AUP New Poets 12 adjusts and corrects the imbalances found in our world.
Poetry is what we turn to often without knowing it.
The reader can rise again and get a new insight.
It could be about metre and syntax, tone and musical trueness, but here in New Zealand we seem to love the unpredictability of this genre.
To be inventive, emotional and artistic all at the same time takes talent.
Auckland University Press celebrates angelic potential and motions of the soul regularly.
Zephyr Zhang is a queer writer based in Auckland.
Their poetry has appeared in plenty of journals.
Urban contemporary life is looked at intensely.
It might be a city park, a used car yard, a supermarket trolley or a Dyson lux.
Loretta Riach is a queer artist who has spent time as the artist-in-residence on the island of Klovharun, Finland.
They use uncompromising language and are inspired by both the novel and film versions of Picnic at Hanging Rock in “Rock Fragments”.
The reader soon gets that the self-idea-thing is a search.
There is a big welcome to this exciting imagination.
There is a glimpsed alternative, a world to which we turn incessantly and often without knowing it.
Anuja Mitra was born in San Diego but calls Tāmaki Makaurau home.
Place, identity and loss fill up the pages of her chapbook “Bruised History”.
I love her treatment of time.
These are poems that offer personal solutions to a crisis, momentary stays against the confusion of the world.
It could be “On being unhaunted”, the title poem, or “Regarding the girl crying in the library bathroom”.
It is good to stick with these three emerging voices.
The reader can experience them spreading their wings for the first time.
Just for a moment, the restrained elegiac lyric voice finds a role and a place.
The hectic, verbose, fact-fuelled, know-it-all world where many things that glitter are not gold needs new poets.
Hamesh Wyatt lives in Bluff. He reads and writes poetry