Former New Zealand poet laureates take their place alongside several writers yet to publish books in the 2025 issue of Ōrongohau | Best New Zealand Poems.

Selected by acclaimed poet, Cilla McQueen, the online collection showcases the richness and variety of New Zealand poetry—while many of the pieces deal with personal loss, others delight in absurdity.

Cilla declares the local poetry scene as “less a playing field than a landscape, its distinctive topography as various in all its parts and salient points as our familiar landscape of Aotearoa,” with this collection of 25 poems deeply grounded in the whenua / land.

New poet Jackson McCarthy’s ‘Three Southern Songs’ takes us from Punatapu to Kawarau via Arrowtown, while the more established Rhian Gallagher digs in the garden for potatoes and unearths a memory. We turn to the sea in David Eggleton’s ‘The Navigators’ as he calls to his family’s voyages across the moana.

The landscape of Ōrongohau | Best New Zealand Poems 2025 stretches far and wide, as Chris Tse brings us to a bridge in Amsterdam to watch “the water turn / from passage to mirror & back again.” With Jenny Bornholdt’s ‘Mr Boltanski’, we’re in Japan, listening for the heartbeat of a stranger. Bill Manhire, meanwhile, draws close to one particular child in Gaza as he tries “to see the world he is leaving”, with the weight of thousands of dead Palestinian children pressing between the lines.

Many of this year’s poems are trying to make sense of grief, whether individual or on a broader scale. Tusiata Avia writes about the loss of a parent with candor and gravitas. A poem from our current poet laureate Robert Sullivan honours the life of a toroa, whose bones carry her song after she’s gone. Kate Camp writes, “I personally walked away from hope some years ago”, while Alex Stone captures the moment after receiving devastating news.

Cilla’s selection also makes space for the presence of laughter and joy in our poetry. Nick Ascroft recounts swiping a glass of wine from Helen Clark’s table at a book awards ceremony. Erik Kennedy’s sardonic Christmas poem opens with the question, “Would you rather be alone / or with someone you dislike”, and Elizabeth Smither places a domestic cat in conversation with Wittgenstein.

In her introduction to the collection, Cilla describes her triage process for the “few thousand” poems that came her way for consideration. After dividing the poems into piles of “definite”, “possible”, and “probably not”, she whittled the stacks down to the final list. She writes of the final selection, “These are poems which I consider durable.”

Ōrongohau | Best New Zealand Poems 2025 is published annually by the International Institute of Modern Letters at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University, with support from Creative New Zealand. The selection is made by a different editor each year.

Ōrongohau | Best New Zealand Poems 2025 can be viewed online at www.bestnewzealandpoems.org.nz.