I was waiting at Upper Hutt station recently when I overheard a young woman sigh/muse to her companion: “Life … like it’s sad … at college you’re friends with everyone … almost … that’s faded … now … like you got to break the ice.”

Break the ice – connect, that is. I could see the conversation arranged, revoiced, connected, as poems are. Vincent O Sullivan’s ambition was to write poems the way you speak to your neighbours. Who are our neighbours and how hard that is to do now. In this world, plain-speaking is just one way to attempt a poem. In the new Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook anthology, edited by Hamilton writer Dr Tracey Slaughter, speaking is a plurality, a cacophony.

Many of the 150 or so poets in the collection are not okay, not with Aotearoa and/or not with themselves either. They struggle to breathe in the dense, miasmic airspaces of flats and inequalities, of the dominant political culture, but they protest and make room to breathe nonetheless. Slaughter writes that “Be aware of the rhythm of your breathing” is the catch cry of the 2025 Yearbook. Like many of the poets, this reader struggled to see how individual voices and breaths could make a difference. Slaughter pitches this poetry as a struggle for breath. On the other hand, she suggests that though poetic lines are slight, they “shiver with the worldwide”.

As poets shiver, so too do their readers. Starting in on these poems, I recalled the refusals of Marina Tsvetaeva, a poet living under the harshest duress. She wrote in 1917, “For complete concurrence of souls, there needs to be a concurrence of breath, for what is breath, if not the rhythm of the soul? So, for humans to understand one another, they must walk or lie side by side.” And I thought too of Ilya Kaminsky, a Ukrainian poet, who quotes Shestov, a philosopher who rejected stoic “wisdom” as a response to his times: “Isn’t there something horrible in Spinoza’s advice to philosophers! ‘Not to laugh, not to weep, not to hate, but to understand.’ On the contrary, says Shestov, a man should shout, scream, laugh, jeer, protest.’”

As I dived further into the anthology’s melee, I wondered whether to applaud the rowdy drive of this swag of poets against the status quo as a sign of the resilient and even healthy state of New Zealand poetry. They have one poem a piece in the Yearbook, except for Mark Prisco, this year’s featured poet, who has 15.

Read the full review at Newsroom here.