Everything Talks: paperback

Organized in six distinct sections, this debut collection still resonates with an overall cohesiveness. Its poems are original and contradictory—earthy, cryptic, and exquisite. They beautifully utilize the lilting phrase, are attuned to the day’s inflections, and have a gentle ebb and flow, which is often echoed visually by the way the poems are laid out upon the page. The lyricism is neither fragile nor overly lavish and often a marvelous stanza is undercut. Sounds are deliberately thrown askew by a laconic expression or a surprisingly forthright final image. Experimental in form, this is poetry that rewards an immersed and slow read. Grounded in the west coast of Auckland and the locales of Karekare, the Manukau Harbor, and the Waitakere Ranges, the poems also reach from ancient Egypt and 15th-century France to 19th-century Tahiti and the United States in 1963. Touching on biography, archaeology, and even astronomy, this compendium proves that poetry can handle both global ideas and universal concerns.

Sam Sampson is the author of Encompassed and Gauguin’s Poiësis. His poems have appeared in Jacket, Landfall, Poetry Review, Salt, Shearsman Magazine, Slope, and Stand. His work has been selected for the 2004 Best New Zealand Poems Online and he will be the Curnow Reader at the 2007 Going West Festival.