Edited by Jordan Hamel, Rebecca Hawkes, Erik Kennedy and Essa Ranapiri (Auckland University Press)
Can poetry save us? In No Other Place to Stand, ninety-one writers with connections to Aotearoa New Zealand grapple with the biggest issue on the planet right now, and while the answer isn’t quite yes, it isn’t quite no, either. As Alice Te Punga Somerville says in the introduction to the collection, here the “poets mourn and rage and share vulnerabilities and gently cry and trace whakapapa and burn things to the ground and create new knowledge about the world.”

In doing so, they distill what can be an overwhelming and loss-of-hope-inducing subject into something we might process, bit by bit. The book works as a survey of how a broad spectrum of poets and writers, many of them young, are approaching climate change; it’s a range that is fascinating, thought-provoking, and even, sometimes, humorous, believe it or not.
In ‘Mummy issues’, the poet and artist Jessica Hinerangi refers to Papatūānuku (the land or Earth Mother) as “my hot māmā, the one that all the boys came over / to look at after school”, while Dominic Hoey tells us about a friend who always has the radio on: “every time I come over / some scientist is yelling / ‘the polar bears are burning / the fish have forgotten how to swim / and the mosquitoes are immortal’ / but then it cuts to sports.” And Dadon Rowell describes watching the bush fires from the point of view of an expat Australian living in Aotearoa. “There’s dark orange on your windowsill, / but you can’t cry.”
Can poetry save us? Can anything? We’ll just have to take it one small thing at a time. As Dani Yourukouva writes, in the voice of their wilting houseplants, “All of the bees are dying and no one cares if you’re in love or not / except you.” – LW