“To remember a poem is to carry it with you always,” notes editor Anne Kennedy in (AUP). It’s a generous collection of NZ poems, arranged in themes, that might be learned by“If the sky knew half / of what we’re doing / down here // it would be stricken, / inconsolable, / and we would have // nothing but rain”. On that subject, famously, Hone Tūwhare: “I can hear you / making small holes / in the silence / rain” (it’s also translated to te reo). Some may know the whole of Denis Glover’s “Quardle oodle” or “I do not dream of Sussex Downs” poems, but how about Nick Ascroft’s “As I slur sweet nothings // At the nurses, passing like white buses”, or Hera Lindsay Bird’s “Your beauty is heavy on my eyes, like tiny anvils”?
