Top picks for poetry
Should you wish to recline with some good poetry this summer, here are 10 of the best collections.
ALZHEIMER’S AND A SPOON by Liz Breslin (Otago University Press)
Exuberant, witty debut volume, treating tragic matters with an amazing lightness of touch.
BAD THINGS by Louise Wallace (Victoria University Press)
Free verse, prose poems, aphorisms and truckloads of irony as the poet riffs on culture high and low.
FLOW: WHANGANUI RIVER POEMS by Airini Beautrais (Victoria University Press)
Rich in detail and accessible to a wide audience, a love letter to the history and nature of the poet’s region.
FULLY CLOTHED AND SO FORGETFUL by Hannah Mettner (Victoria University Press)
Sometimes opaque and selfreferencing, an intriguing debut with a disenchanted view of meetings and partings.
HOARD by Fleur Adcock (Victoria University Press)
Unashamedly retrospective and very engaging, a senior voice tells of lost love, lost innocence, and politics long ago.
MANIFESTO AOTEAROA:
101 POLITICAL POEMS edited by Philip Temple and Emma Neale (Otago University Press)
Exactly what its title says, a big and diverse anthology showing just how broad the definition of “political poem” can be.
NIGHT HORSE by Elizabeth Smither (Auckland University Press)
One of the best from a seasoned poet adept at both cool irony and a forgiving view of human nature.
THE ONES WHO KEEP QUIET by David Howard (Otago University Press)
Brilliant, intellectually challenging collection from New Zealand’s master of the longform poem.
SURRENDER by Janet Charman (Otago University Press)
Loose, chatty and engaging poems on what it is to be a writer among writers.
THE YIELD by Sue Wootton (Otago University Press)
Intelligent, well crafted and involving poems on nature, time and a nagging spiritual sense.
back at the refugees and émigrés who brought modernism to our cultural shores – largely absent from our art and architectural historical record until now (see story, page 22).
UNDREAMED OF … 50 YEARS OF THE FRANCES HODGKINS FELLOWSHIP by Priscilla Pitts and Andrea Hotere (Otago University Press)
Great writing, beautiful design, important photographs – a highly readable insight into the fellowship that cultivated New Zealand art. SCIENCE & NATURE THE ASCENT OF GRAVITY:
THE QUEST TO UNDERSTAND THE FORCE
THAT EXPLAINS EVERYTHING by Marcus Chown
(Hachette)
Gravity may be the leastunderstood force in the universe, but cosmologist Chown ably tackles the abstract with clarity and humour. EAT ME: A NATURAL AND UNNATURAL HISTORY OF CANNIBALISM by Bill Schutt
(Profile)
Humans are cannibalistically inventive, but the animal world is truly brutal when it comes to gobbling kith and kin. Fascinating.
THE HISTORY OF BEES by Maja Lunde (Simon & Schuster)
Norwegian author’s enjoyable and enlightening cautionary ecological tale intertwines three apian stories across 250 years.
INFERIOR: HOW SCIENCE GOT WOMEN WRONG – AND THE NEW RESEARCH THAT’S REWRITING THE STORY by Angela Saini (4th Estate)
Science writer
Saini picks up the gender thread with her tour through periods of discovery and shows that inequality permeates sex studies from start to finish and continues today. RISINGTIDEFALLING STAR by Philip Hoare
(4th Estate)
Hoare’s ode to oceans is lyrical, odd, indulgent, unputdownable. If you are going to write a history-soaked, literary-pilgrimage nature book, this is the way to do it
THE SONGS OF TREES: STORIES FROM NATURE’S GREAT CONNECTORS by David George Haskell (Black Inc)
US scientist-cumpoet Haskell has produced a second arboreal book that, like his first, The Forest Unseen, is eloquently written and an even deeper meditation on ecology.
TAMED: TEN SPECIES THAT CHANGED OUR WORLD by Alice Roberts (Hutchinson)
Prof Roberts, whose last book made an epic story of embryonic development, explores 10 wild species that we subdued and domesticated – including ourselves. TESTOSTERONE REX: UNMAKING THE MYTHS OF OUR GENDERED MINDS by Cordelia Fine
(Icon)
Fine’s cutting, dry-humoured critique of the myth that inequality of the sexes is somehow biological rather than cultural.
TŌTARA: A NATURAL AND CULTURAL HISTORY by Philip Simpson (Auckland University Press)
Thoroughly researched and beautifully illustrated tome full of the science behind the ancient tōtara, its conservation and its role in Māori culture. THE UNDOING PROJECT by Michael Lewis
(Penguin)
Moneyball and The Big Short author Lewis brings his clear-eyed ability to tell engaging stories about arcane worlds of numbers to his study of the partnership of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, trailblazing psychologists and pioneers in behavioural economics. SCI-FI ALL OUR WRONG TODAYS by Elan Mastai
(Penguin Random House)
Absorbing brainteasing time-travel tale about a man who journeys back from a utopian flying-car future to find he might like our defective present better.
NEW YORK 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson (Hachette)
Big Apple sinks to new depths in this ambitious epic that imagines a city still functioning after a 15m rise in sea levels, but with its inhabitants caught up in age-old political conflicts.
THE POWER by Naomi Alderman (Penguin)
A smart, thrilling, feminist dystopian tale with echoes of Margaret Atwood. When teenage girls develop an ability to spark electricity from their hands, the capability more than evens the odds in the battle of the sexes.
STAR SAILORS by James McNaughton (Victoria University Press)
A worryingly convincing picture of how runaway climate change may affect New Zealand 30 years hence, complete with a space-alien prophet turning up in Hokitika.
WALKAWAY by Cory Doctorow (HarperCollins)
Tech-thinker and digital-rights activist’s riveting return to grown-up sci-fi contemplates a near-future in which folk have decided to opt out of participating in a capitalist economy.
THE WANDERERS by Meg Howrey (Simon & Schuster)
Brainy book about space travel that doesn’t actually blast off but follows a virtual mission to Mars for three astronauts spending 17 months in a spacecraft simulator. More psych-fi than sci-fi.