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Anchor Stone
Tony Beyer
Published by Cold Hub Press
Tony Beyer’s Anchor Stone is a considerable achievement. The poems reach out to the reader directly, and articulate a humanist vision.
There is consistently a ne clarity in Beyer’s use of language, in particular of imagery and tonal colour. He responds to the relationship between the natural world and ourselves and excels
at making the local, immediate world around us turn to and into deeper moments of experience.
Rāwāhi
Briar Wood
Published by Anahera Press
With a highly tuned lyric voice, Briar Wood demonstrates how poetry can ‘make intimate everything that it touches’, enabling the
reader to engage at an emotional and feeling level. A ne image maker, Wood time and again composes poems that express how the truth of the imagination can be discovered and enacted in a language rich with lyricism and cultural reference.
Judges: Robert Sullivan, Michael Harlow and Alison Wong
Poetry
Night Horse
Elizabeth Smither
Published by Auckland University Press
These are the poems of a rst-rate poet at work, using her knowledge, long experience—
this is Elizabeth Smither’s eighteenth collection of poetry—and practice of
the craft of poetry to great advantage. As a whole Night Horse is a stimulating, thoughtful and pleasurable read, and it is distinctive for the way in which Smither consistently makes poems that get ‘lifted into the light’.
The Yield
Sue Wootton
Published by Otago University Press
Sue Wootton takes an ordinary, familiar experience and/or object and imaginatively
transforms it into something other, deeper in thought and larger in meaning. In a number of poems she shows a clear awareness of and concern for our relationship to the natural world [in crisis/crises]. She brings us the light and the dark of human experience, often divided of itself, seeking balance and reconciliation.
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