Longing, fragility, romance and other tidal forces collide in AUP New Poets 9.

In poems by Sarah Lawrence, harold coutts and Arielle Walker, three fresh, vivid voices arrive. In ‘Clockwatching’, Sarah Lawrence hurtles us into a world full of friends and homes and things, and wonders what they all might leave behind: ‘If it’s toothache or budget / margarine or perhaps / another world altogether.’ harold coutts’ ‘longing’ reflects on gender (‘if gender is a taste i am cutting out my tongue’), bodies (‘pubelessness’) and the rest (‘there isn’t a manual on when you’re writing someone a love poem and they break up with you’). And in ‘river poems’ Arielle Walker steps right into the water – because ‘a poem is a fluid thing all wrapped up in fish skin’ – and finds stories of sealskins, harakeke and thistle, kānuka and mānuka, alder and elder. Brimming with vivid beauty, the contemporary and the inflections of memory, AUP New Poets 9 shows just what new writing can open up.