“chisel-bouncer / you are the big stick / made with fire / and containing the means / of making more sacred and profane” (“te ahi tapu rākau / jacob’s fire song,” ‘MIRABILE DICTU,’ 18). Pictured left to right: New Zealand poets laureate Elizabeth Smither, Michele Leggott, Jenny Bornholdt, Brian Turner, and Bill Manhire. Photo by Maarten Holl, courtesy of Stuff Limited.
The volume MIRABILE DICTU (2009) celebrates Michele Leggott’s tenure as inaugural Aotearoa-New Zealand poet laureate (2007–9) and marks an inflection point in her poetic career. In brief, the volume presents a world of adaptation: coming and going, joining and severing, isolation and community.
Mark Young is a poet drawn to prodigious production as much as he is to the idiosyncrasies of living creatures. Songs to Come for the Salamander: Poems 2013–2021 represents a near-decade’s worth of poems, picking up roughly from where Pelican Dreaming: Poems 1959–2008 left off.[1]
Allen Curnow (1911–2001) was a dominant force in New Zealand letters and became an internationally acclaimed poet, anthologist, and critic.[1] Together, the 2017 Auckland University Press poems and biography provide a substantial (1120-page!) recognition of his achievement. Let me offer what follows as a kind of searching tribute.
