The Best of Best New Zealand Poems

The publishers have described this collection as " a colourful and diverse portrait of the current robust health of New Zealand poetry" and I reckon they are pretty much spot on.

For ten years guest editors have chosen their 25 favourite poems published in the previous year for publication in the online Annual, Best of NZ Poems, hosted by the IIML at Victoria University.
Now in this book editors Bill Manhire and Damien Wilkins  have selected their best 65 poems from the annuals.
In addition the book includes biogaphies of the chosen and personal statements about the inspiration of their poems.
This is a collection all poetry lovers must own.

I often find the introductions to collections of poetry rather dry and acadaemic but to my surprise and delight I really enjoyed Damien Wilkins' effort - entertaining, relevant and accessible.The publishers have kindly agreed to let me reproduce the first three paras of that introduction and these follow.

"Who can forget the recent pained tweet of my co-editor, Bill Manhire: ‘the paper is dying!’ He’d just opened his 1988 Faber hardback copy of Philip Larkin’s Collected Poems.

Okay, it’s not quite as alarming as West Indian cricketer Chris Gayle from the World Cup: ‘Bangladesh stoning our bus!!! Feeling glass break!!! This is ridiculous!!! Damn!!!’ But still, book-owners will recognise Bill’s dismay. Last month I discovered that my Viking Portable Hardy had become still more portable—it was being carried off by the bug that makes a queasy lace of pages. The evidence is mounting: things turn to dust.

Which does make this project a bit quaint. After all, the annual ‘Best New Zealand Poems’ has been online for ten years and presumably will remain online until sea-levels wipe us out. If you wanted to, you could leave off reading this right now, tap whatever connected device you have at hand, and make your own Best Of, or several Best Ofs. In the contemporary mode of multiple paths and answer-back-the-teacher comments sections, fixing such a selection to an actual page looks decidedly retro. So why do it?

Because we do like books—those fading, failing homes in whose silent rooms the mites are, even as we write, eating our words. And because there are now 250 poems on the site. (Navigation—as if we were ships not readers—is getting trickier.) And because, as people who are paid to think about language, we were curious about what such a selection might look like, and what it might tell us about a decade we suspected—rightly, as it turns out—was full of life. And finally, let’s face it, because it feels very nice to point and say, ‘Look at this!’ This book points at many marvellous things."

Buy the book and enjoy the rest of Wilkins' musings, not to mention the stunning collection of verse.

The Best of Best New Zealand Poems

Edited by Bill Manhire & Damien Wilkins

Victoria University Press - $35