I'm reading for takahē this week, around 340 poems. Last month I read around 1,300 poems for the 2018 New Zealand Poetry Society Anthology. I've read a lot of free verse. I've read a lot of poems about the New Zealand landscape, seascape. Don't get me wrong, I l love free verse, I love the landscape ... loss ... love. But the poems that stand out are the ones that experiment; they have a confident voice, they use irony, they play with tone. The form is exactly right for the content. I get to the end of them and sigh. Or I get to the end of them and I don't know what it is that has made me shiver. They're complex. They don't tell. They're mysterious. I have to read them again. And again. And
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