Gregory O’Brien is a Wellington artist, writer and curator. He recently delivered the Janet Frame Memorial lecture at the start of NZ Book Month. He had this to say —

“Poetry is definitely the point at which literature is most overtly and visibly a laboratory — and this is played out in recent collections such as Anna Jackson’s expressionistic bricolage The Gas Leak, and in the dazzling yet dirge-like verse of Geoff Cochrane; in the dramatic monologue of Tusiata Avia and Jo Randerson; in the crystal clear seeing and saying of Richard von Sturmer’s Suchness; and in the atomized verbal structures of Kate Camp, James Brown, James McNaughton, Janis Freegard, Airini Beautrais and Michele Amas who seem to have happily adopted Cilla McQueen’s maxim that writing should aim at “kicking the habit of 100% corrected vision”.

To read the work of some more great New Zealand poets visit Best of New Zealand Poetry 2008 and Turbine, an online literary journal.

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