Bill Manhire: 121 New Zealand poems

Bill Manhire — poet and director of the International Institute of Modern Letters — has, through his writing, teaching, editing and broadcasting, probably done more to widen the audience for poetry in New Zealand than any other individual.

This anthology, expanded from its first edition in 1993 which was called 100 New Zealand Poems, is one of his most effective instruments.

Anthologies can be put together according to many different principles: historical, chronological, thematic, national, ideological, technical, ethnic, gender-based, or by sexual preference.

Manhire's anthology restricts itself to New Zealand poems (the national principle), but is otherwise free of any single determining factor.

There are short poems and long poems (from four lines to over 400 for Ian Wedde's Pathway to the Sea), famous poems and obscure poems, rhyming poems and poems set out as prose (including texts originally published as short stories by Janet Frame and Owen Marshall, and as part of a novel by Lloyd Jones), old poems and new poems (ranging from an anonymous sealer's ballad written around 1810 to Sonja Yelish's IYA published in 2004); even good poems (plenty of those) and bad poems (such as Thomas Bracken's hoary but once-famous old chestnut Not Understood).

There are other distinctive features. Every poet — whether the great and the good (e.g. James K. Baxter, Allen Curnow, Elizabeth Smither) or below-the-radar obscure (have you heard of John Gallas or Adrian Croucher?) — is given one poem only, avoiding the hierarchical pecking order which is endemic to most anthologies.

And in the body of the text the poems are printed without authors' names; to discover who wrote what you have to turn to the notes or the index of poets at the back. The merit of this decision is that (unless you cheat) you first read the poem free of the preconceptions or prejudices that come from knowing who wrote it.

As far as I can tell, 121 is an arbitrary number, but the increase from 100 has enabled Manhire to pick poems from many of the bright young things who have emerged during the past decade, such as Anne Kennedy, Robert Sullivan, Kapka Kassabova, Anna Jackson, Tusiata Avia, Glenn Colquhoun and Kate Camp.

He has also rewritten the introduction and updated the notes, making the book not only highly enjoyable but also useful in pointing the reader in the right direction to find out more.

* Godwit, $29.95