2005 Christmas reads: Poetry

Lifted
By Bill Manhire
(Victoria University Press $24.95)

Oooooo..!!!
By Hone Tuwhare
(Steel Roberts $24.95)

Voice Carried My Family
By Robert Sullivan
(Auckland University Press $21.99)

Cover Stories
By Stephanie de Montalk
(Victoria University Press $24.95)

A Box of Bees
By Emily Dobson
(Victoria University Press $17.95)

Afternoon of an Evening Train
By Gregory O'Brien
(Victoria University Press $24.95)

Red Leaves 
By Diana Bridge
(Auckland University Press $21.99)

An endless stream of poetry publications flows from those few of the nation's publishers who support this important but essentially uncommercial medium. In most cases (including all but two of the above titles) Creative New Zealand helps out with a grant, usually of $2000-$3000. Generally, this goes towards reducing the retail cost of each copy by $4-$6 so the small but dedicated poetry-reading public at least gets some benefit from its tax dollars.

University presses, such as those of Auckland and Victoria who publish most of the best poets, are themselves subsidised by the institutions whose names they bear, and they in turn further subsidise the publication of poetry by their better-selling titles in fiction or non-fiction. Print runs are small, often as few as 500 copies, seldom more than 1000.

Nobody makes any significant money out of this activity; neither the publishers, nor the booksellers, and certainly not the poets. If an edition of 500 sells out — a rare but not unknown event — the poet might receive royalties of $1000 or so, for work which may have taken several years to assemble.

If this seems like a melancholy recital of facts about a moribund medium, it isn't really. On the contrary, poetry might be said to be thriving. The titles listed here were selected from around four times that number published in recent months.

So, thanks to a benevolent state, some far-sighted institutions and individuals within the publishing sector, occasional support from the print and electronic media, and the "fit audience though few", in Milton's immortal phrase, that the better poets reach, the ancient and noble art of poetry, that began (as T.S. Eliot once said) "with the beating of a drum in the jungle" continues to survive, intrigue and delight in this country as elsewhere.

And, significantly, it does so somewhere below the radar of a market economy. The poets can write what they like, blissfully free of market pressures and demands, and according to their own dictates and predilections.

Of the poets whose titles are listed here, Hone Tuwhare and Bill Manhire are icons of our poetry whose work is loved by many. Manhire is in darkly brilliant form in a death-haunted but scintillating collection, whereas Tuwhare is far below his best though still indestructibly vigorous in his 80s.

O'Brien, de Montalk, Sullivan and Bridge are good mid-career writers, all writing effectively on distinctive and now well-established personal pathways. Emily Dobson is a highly promising new-comer who writes engagingly about bees and beekeeping. One to watch out for.