Review: AUP New Poets 12
'...thoughtful, tender, and playful meditations on place, self, and the haunting of both.'
AUP New Poets 12, the latest in Auckland University Press’ New Poets series, delivers poems from three emerging New Zealand poets, Zephyr Zhang, Loretta Riach, and Anuja Mitra. Each poet delivers thoughtful, tender, and playful meditations on place, self, and the haunting of both.
Zhang’s speaks to the existentialism of urban living. A self-professed nocturnal, their collection Moonlight Circuit is musings after dark. In ‘My Immortal Angst’, the speaker is an “emo vampire”:
my parents don’t get it
they’re like why don’t you be like your cousin dracula
go terrorise a village
i’m like mom, dad, it’s not about sucking blood anymore
it’s about sucking at life
i dream about being famous
i dream about being sparkly
In ‘Bilateral FESS Frontal Recess & External Septoplasty, EPTP’, the speaker is diagnosed with a rare health condition, and the desire to be sparkly is fulfilled as a curse:
am I special / all my life I wanted to be
something else / something sharp and shiny /
something you cannot stop looking at / tell me
I am a glitter supernova / a gifted superbloom
Exception / am I dying
Zhang’s work is immediately recognisable and pleasing in the casual ease of their poetic voice. Their introspection and wit floats effortlessly off the page to charm readers, even in the face of despair. Their humour feels effortless, shifting in and out of the light, and sliding into turns of phrase to evoke the night magic they know is ever-present.
Riach’s Possum, on the other hand,wrestles with trying to make a new home after moving to Naarm, and how building an artistic life in the current climate can feel like beating a dead animal. In ‘Retired from Art, New Career in Sandwiches’:
Everything is meaningful
even when the meaning is a terrible let-down.
I want to make something out of this,
even when it is hard
and I feel far away from anything gentle.
…
Every poem has a possum inside of it
and I have to poke it with a stick
to make sure it’s really dead.
Central to the collection is the problematic nature of settling on stolen land. ‘Rock Fragments’ interpolates the Australian novel and film Picnic at Hanging Rock, and strategic documents from the Victorian Government to remember colonial violence:
[every white dress like an admission of defeat]
[every white myth an omission ] [ of a vanishing]
[the thing about myth is that it is an easier story to tell] [the truth is ]
[everything ends]
[this is exactly right]
As the poem continues, the blank spaces grow, leaving poignant silences that force us to imagine buried truths, and acknowledge the intentional omissions of indigenous cultures from Australian history. For Riach, the work of an artist is to continue making meaning and asserting these truths, even when digging for the core is uncomfortable.
Bruised History from Mitra rewinds the poet’s immigrant history in search of tangible roots. It is a different kind of haunting as the speaker grapples with loss in many forms – of their childhood home in San Diego, of a parent, and of their cultural heritage. In ‘By Any Other Name’:
and I consider the ways
in which we shrink ourselves
how my name drops from my mouth
like a jumbled admission
Mitra speaks to a familiar consequence of assimilation, that one is peer-pressured to enact self-erasure to gain a sense of belonging in a foreign place. There is the inevitable heartbreak of being unable to reclaim an essential part of yourself later in adulthood, due to the disappearance of language, family who carried generational knowledge, and distance from the homeland.
Each poet reckons with how the legacies of the past bleed into the struggles of modern life. They have an acute awareness of how the landscape is haunted, and how belonging to it renders the self a ghostly figure. Zhang, Riach, and Mitra, in all their troubles and triumphs, bring compelling perspectives on what it is to live a meaningful life in places that seem increasingly inhospitable. From the forefront, these poets reflect, shape, and welcome in a brave new world.
