The Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook 2026 — issue #60 — arrives with the weight of its 75‑year history, a lineage stretching back to Louis Johnson’s slim 1951 volume. What began as a tentative national anthology has become New Zealand’s longest‑running poetry journal, a rare feat of continuity in a literary culture often vulnerable to the vagaries of funding and fashion.
The Yearbook is both mirror and map: A mirror — reflecting the diversity and urgency of contemporary NZ poetry. And as a map — guiding readers toward future directions, from Pasifika voices to experimental forms.
From Baxter and Curnow in the early decades to Tse, Ranapiri, and Avia today, the Yearbook remains a living chorus of voice. From Elizabeth Hawkes’ All Souls and Josiah Morgan’s redactions embody the tension between tradition and innovation.
A legacy and well grounded whakapapa. Johnson’s founding vision was succeeded by Frank McKay, who revived the series in the 1970s, and later David Drummond and Alistair Paterson, whose long tenure (1993–2014) consolidated its reach.
Jack Ross reframed the journal in the 2010s, reconnecting it with its roots, before DR Tracey Slaughter assumed editorship in 2021. Slaughter’s rebranding as Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook signals both continuity and change: a reaffirmation of national identity, but also a commitment to inclusivity and risk.
You may know her - the award-winning poet and short story writer. Her books include Her Body Rises, The Longest Drink in Town, Deleted Scenes for Lovers, Devil’s Trumpet and The girls in the red house are singing. She has been the editor of the Poetry New Zealand Yearbook since 2020.
The 2026 Edition anniversary volume is substantial: 138 new poems and 29 reviews. Amongst the pages, is featured poet, Josiah Morgan, who contributes work that is both remarkable and unsettling. The texts are full of what appear to be redactions of words, sensitive references that the reader must assume or fill in themselves, altering how each person interprets the text. The poetry is as much investigative as it is artistic. It challenges our perception of authority, conspiracy and truth.
Those blank text redactions, leave stark absences where language might otherwise reside. These silences are not evasions but provocations, forcing the reader to confront censorship, fragility, and the limits of articulation. In the poen (Redacted) After Ralph Hotere the visual blanks reflect otere's use of the colour black as a representation to his cultural standing and the way Māori have been deliberatly written out of history and culture over the years.
In Slaughter’s interview with Morgan we learn the origins of the idea - inspired byGrant Maierhofer's horror novel GAG in which every detail about a haunting is redacted except details of the house itself. Also rescent media treatment of the war in Gaza and refusing to label it a genocide was another strong influence. "We're living in a historical moment in which so many of us can see so many things clearly, and yet themediascape and the apparatus of power and politics," Morgan says. "keeps it from us."
The Yearbook’s title comes from Rebecca Hawkes’ poem, All Souls, one of the most resonant contributions. It's written after Hidegard of Bingen - 12th century abess, mystic, composer, scientist, polymath (1098-1179) - now recognised as a Doctor Of The Church (one of only 4 ever).
Elegiac and contemplative, it meditates on mortality, collective silence, and remembrance. The poem’s title invokes the Christian festival but broadens it into a secular reflection on absence and continuity. Hawkes’ pared‑back diction and structural pauses echo Morgan’s redactions, though with a more traditional elegiac tone. In the context of the 75th anniversary, All Souls functions as a commemorative anchor, reminding readers of the lineage of poets who have passed through the Yearbook’s pages.
The lines of her poem reference the elements as if they are ancient gods in the form of birds:
"The air all charged with wings, beating
the colour of nothing. That fire zephyr-tinted,
vapours faint. Our former giants
burning. "
And there are tiny links to the mortals on earth, too. Food is used as a metaphor for natures power:
"On earth, titans shucked roofs from bungalows
and spat them out in paddocks: shells sucked empty
ready to recarpet. In sparse gardens, abandoned angels
hum around nectar feeders."
There is a veritable treasure trove of new poetry, much by writers I'm not familiar with. But really want to find out more about. Here's a couple of lines from one surprising (and ultimately heartbreaking) poem by Michaela Selby called Two Hours
"It takes two hours
To ridethe naenae bus
to rugby practivce
with
brown bantums on saturday
it takes two hours
for the pain to recede
after a pelting
from your father's
buckle'
Simple words like this continue, loaded with memories both good and bad, about growing up.
Mark Prisco looks to our tupuna as if they are some controlling force. The poem is sarcastic and also poignant as he revels their 'antics' in The Dead Are At It Again.
"the dead see everything that happens
the dead see themselves looking in
& out.
the dead don't show their hand, they pretend
not to notice
the dead feel their feelings but feel nothing
for you. "
And beyond the poetry are reviews and substatial critical engagement - 29 in all, from Simon Sweetman to Dame Fiona Kidman, providing real intellectual ballast. These reviews ensure the Yearbook is not merely a showcase but a site of debate, mapping the terrain of contemporary
The Yearbook is more than a local anthology. It is a testament to poetry’s persistence in a small nation with a large imaginative reach. The juxtaposition of Morgan’s radical redactions with Hawkes’ elegiac All Souls exemplifies the Yearbook’s refusal to ossify: it commemorates its past while insisting on innovation.
At seventy‑five years, the Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook is both archive and experiment, heritage and provocation. It remains a living chorus, defined not by government or funding but by people, culture, and art.
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