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AUP New Poets 11: Xiaole Zhan, Margo Montes de Oca, J. A. Vili
editor Anne Kennedy, Auckland University Press, 2025

The AUP New Poet series has launched the careers of many poets, consistently showcasing the depth and breadth of poetry in Aoteraoa. Editor Anne Kennedy has drawn together three distinctive writers, whether in view of style, form or subject matter, yet there are also vital connections. For example, the poets – Xiaole Zhan, Margo Montes de Oca and J. A. Vili – acknowledge a history of poetry reading, referencing writers that have nurtured and inspired them. There are recurrent anchors in memory, experience, ideas, politics, the personal, everyday contexts. Above all, there is the contagious transmission of joy. Whether I am entering fields of pain, grief, wonder or philosophy, I am experiencing joy as I read. Absolute delight in what poetry can do.

I have reviewed each section, and followed that with a reading and conversation with each poet.

Auckland University press page

63.

In the drench, there is a room where my Pākeha grandfather waits beside
an upright piano covered in dust. His eyes are milky with illness. Lucius
Seneca crouches in the corner, wheezing in and out. The piano has outlived
the axe, and the tree, and both men in the room. Like the word heaven.

Xiaole Zhan
from Arcadiana

Xiaole Zhan’s hybrid sequence, Arcadiana, resembles an album of navigations; writing that can be claimed as essay, poetry, memoir, prose . . . a suite of cross fertilisations. At its heart, and yes this is a sequence with heart, is the magnetic pull of storytelling. Why do stories matter to us? Does poetry matter?

I want to share some of my readings avenues through ‘Arcadiana’ in order to offer a taste of my delight. I often flag poetry that moves me, but what do I mean by ‘move’? For me to be be moved as a poetry reader encompasses multiple movements, maybe like a sonata might move mind, heart and body. It’s intake of breath and goosebump skin. So yes, I am intensely and wonderfully moved by Arcadiana’.

Xiaole is exploring their memory chambers, hunting out piquant and personal detail that sticks, sometimes unsettling, detail that sets them musing. It’s sights and smells and sounds; it’s childhood and healing strength. It is a storehouse of stories, most especially the thorny depository in the Bible, with its violence, horrors and miracles. Just like fairytales. The cruel Pakehā grandfather, the nasty Pakehā stepfather, reading to the young child. It’s the strengthening mother.

Philosophical threads captivate my hunger for ideas, especially in the open field of storytelling, especially as we navigate lies and belief, how to advance and enhance what we tell. How we might fall upon mourning in music, and music in mourning. This metonymic rubbing, this idea against that experience, that experience against this idea. Ah. The citations from key thinkers/writers, in keeping with the mode of essayist, enriching links to history, culture, intellectual thought, personal experience. And in this open field, reading and writing are both forms of listening.

I love how moisture, drench and stormwater are a recurring motif or theme. I find myself exploring the collection in view of its moistness, whether sweet dew or slam of flood. Colonisation. Racism. I soak up a poem’s reach and possibilities. I discover ‘Arcadiana Op. 12’, is a 1994 composition for string quartet written by the English composer Thomas Adès, with both water and land movements, haunting violin. And here we are full circle. Back to movement. Steeped in poetry joy. I won’t forget this reading for ages.

& the window is open – enough for some sky to spill inwards
with a coolness that flows over my arms
and Ru beside me who murmurs and sighs,
his closed eyes half-moons in the pillow-dark.

The more I remember time the more I press my face to the glass of it
the more the outside world seems to vibrate with memory
of its own. It whispers through the window’s mouth &
in a language I half-understand says look,

Margo Montes de Oca
from ‘omens’

As the title suggests, Margo Montes de Oca‘s collection of poems, intertidal, is also a series of movements, but the movement carries you along different currents. Before I started reading, I pondered on the constitution of an intertidal zone, on the idea of ebb and flow, deposit and removal. And then, when I was immersed in the poetry, the first word I jotted down was joy. I felt an incredible brightness, a joy in the natural world, the beach and the river, as the poems embraced sea, time, dream, light, breath, drift, sky.

The physicality of the poems resembles visual buds, detail that opens out a vivid scene, and place simply glows into existence. This is my first love. My second love is the way Margo’s poetry embodies notions of braid, entirely fitting in an intertidal zone. She uses a variety of poetic forms. For example, the poem ‘bajo la luna, un caballo de noche’, is a glosa, a form that braids borrowed lines with the poet’s, in this example Louise Glück (you can hear this poem below). Margo tests out Natalie Linh Bolderston’s invented poetic form, ‘a germination’. Twelve small triplets on the page like a baker’s dozen, poetic buds as much as braids, as the visual layout propels my physical reading in myriad directions. My eyes darting as the poem catches proximity and distance, Mexico and Aotearoa, arrival and farewell, land and light. An intertidal zone. Glorious.

There are also language braids: Spanish nestling alongside English with their different musicalities and heritage, the language of sky, ocean, world, the language of breath . . . all linked to an impulse to read, a compulsion to read the drift of sea or river or cloud. And more than anything, above all, so haunting and evocative, is the braid between ebb and flow, the polyvalent gap. We reach the open window through which the sky spills, the crevice in the floorboards through which the speaker may fall, the fertile gap/movement/bud between today tomorrow, together apart, awake asleep.

A number of poems are written ‘after’ or dedicated to a muse (H. D., Sappho, Louise Glück, Alice Oswald, Virginia Woolf) and again we enter an intertidal zone, because, in a way, we are all reading and writing after the poetry that precedes us, that inspires and nourishes. In reading Margo’s collection, I am ‘setting off into quiet drift’, the poems drawing me deep into the understated and the shadow figures, a mesmeric physicality, the way poetry can be both bud and braid. Glorious.

But I am carved in thought
My tongue is kauri
My eyes are shells
My heart is stone
In a graveyard sowed with death
I am captured –
by how full of life
the weeds are.

J. A. Vili
from ‘Your Tangi’

What I love about AUP New Poets 11, is way the anthology promotes new poetry as many things. There is zero attachment to the formulaic because the poetry stretches possibilities in view of voice, form, mind and heart. The final poet, V. A. Vili, draws us deep into poetry as ache in his chapbook, Poems Lost During the Void. Many of the poems are dedicated to friends and family, and many of the poems depend upon a bloodline of grief and loss. It is personal and it is poignant. In Vili’s bio, we read that the poet has dedicated some of the poems to his children whose mother died when they were young.

I feel like I am entering a precious clearing, a space for bo