When Bill Manhire read at StAnza in March 2009, he was extending an important connection: it was where his Scottish mother and New Zealand father had honeymooned. As Arthur Hugh Clough puts it so breezily, ‘they were married and gone to New Zealand', consigning his characters to oblivion. That coming-and-going between two hemispheres is still not easily accomplished, but it can be managed virtually, at least. For the past year the SPL has been featuring New Zealand poets on its website, introduced by writers in Scotland and beginning with Bill Manhire. We're most grateful to the introducers, and to the poets and publishers who gave us permission to reproduce their work.

We're at an end of that project now, but the connection doesn't suddenly snap. Thanks to Creative New Zealand, we have acquired lots of good New Zealand poetry for the SPL collection (books and CDs), and we'll be adding to that. The Scottish Poetry Library opens windows on to many countries, and we're happy that the landscape of New Zealand poetry – and its soundscape, too – is now available for readers to explore.

› More about this selection

The poets

Gregory O'Brien

Greg O'Brien's Days by Water was published by Carcanet in 1994. Revisiting it, I am again moved by a quality that affected me when I first read his work, a quality the poems share with Greg's graphic and critical work: resolute proportionality...

› Gregory O'Brien introduced by Michael Schmidt
› C.M.'s son: by Gregory O'Brien

Jenny Bornholdt

I first came across Jenny Bornholdt a couple of years ago when I read her collection Summer and was moved by poems about the death of her father. At the time I was researching New Zealand poets with a view to inviting one or two of them to take part in StAnza 2009 as part of our Homecoming celebrations, to recognise connections stretching back generations which link our two countries...

› Jenny Bornholdt introduced by Eleanor Livingstone
› 'Instructions for how to get ahead of yourself while the light still shines' by Jenny Bornholdt

Ian Wedde

I was re-reading Ian Wedde's Commonplace Odes at a cruising height of 35,000 feet the other week, on the interminable journey from Wellington to Glasgow. It was one way of carrying New Zealand with me: the 'grave cone' of Taranaki; the smoke of summer barbecues; the blowy wind; the palms on the Picton foreshore; even the honeysuckle vine planted by the poet at the millennium, scenting his backyard as we talked on the last day of 2008...

› Ian Wedde introduced by Robyn Marsack
› '5.4 To Mount Victoria' by Ian Wedde

Bernadette Hall

The poems of Bernadette Hall are seductive. Their images are luminous, there is an intense visual clarity with underlying meanings that can't quite be deciphered, all held in a hypnotically musical structure. Her poetry has been described as 'like a bird listening/to sounds underground,//probing with little jabs for the worm.' ...

› Bernadette Hall introduced by Gerrie Fellows
› 'Mukluk' by Bernadette Hall

Brian Turner

I spent two months near the end of 1981 hitchhiking around New Zealand,after a year of work and wandering in Australia. I was 23, travelling alone and light, and I was simultaneously embarked on another journey – to discover the literature of my own country, which my education had declined to inform me existed...

› Brian Turner introduced by James Robertson
› Place by Brian Turner

Vincent O'Sullivan

I first came across 'Blame Vermeer' while browsing in a bookshop in Wellington. To be more accurate, my gaze was attracted by the cover of the slim volume of which it is the title poem. It shows a fragment of Vermeer's painting usually known as The Milkmaid (c.1658) and such is the pull of anything by this artist I picked it up immediately...

› Vincent O'Sullivan introduced by David Kinloch
› Blame Vermeer by Vincent O'Sullivan

Dinah Hawken

In the first lines of Small Stories of Devotion, Dinah Hawken gives us her intention: 'I'll stop shuffling under my New Zealand cool, I'll come out / and tell the stories in an eager childlike way'. She's speaking of that long poem-sequence, ostensibly telling someone else's dreams in a heightened linguistically explorative way which contains both the wonder of children and a poetry of vibrant life -- celebration, but it's true of all her work...

› Dinah Hawken introduced by Gerry Loose
› From The Brain and the Leaf by Dinah Hawken

Bob Orr

A country shaped like a butterfly's wing': where is that?
you may ask. But it is no use scanning the world's map.
Butterflies' wings come in as many shapes as the countries of the world, and Bob Orr has been there to see them and sing about them...

› Bob Orr introduced by Kapka Kassabova
› A Country Shaped like a Butterfly's Wing by Bob Orr

Anne Kennedy

Reading Anne Kennedy is not like reading at all. It's like watching a life spin and turn, like a washing machine of words, flipping and sorting and humming with the day to day business of families and children and houses and milk bottles and doctor's appointments and scattered conversations…And love. Always love...

› Anne Kennedy introduced by Kirsty Gunn
› I Am (1) by Anne Kennedy

Glenn Colquhoun

My first encounter with Glenn Colquhoun's poetry was a gift from a New Zealander, my Aunt Fran, in 2003; and the book she gave me was Playing God. They are poems I came to love, not because they call me back to the place of my childhood, or explore a history, or evoke a landscape of tussock or tree ferns...

› Glenn Colquhoun introduced by Gerrie Fellows
› Increasingly sophisticated methods of divination used in the practice of medicine by Glenn Colquhoun

Bill Manhire

'Kevin', the closing poem from Bill Manhire's collection Lifted, caught me the moment I read it in December 2007, when I was browsing in a bookshop in the northland town of Whangarei. I bought the book on the strength of that poem alone…

› Bill Manhire introduced by Alan Riach
› Kevin by Bill Manhire