All Souls: Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook 2026

Tracey Slaughter’s continued strength in building a place where poets can find strength and support is once again shown with all souls - an anniversary volume of this vital yearly poetry anthology publication that is now both an institution and a living record of contemporary poetry in motion. Marking seventy-five years since Louis Johnson established the original New Zealand Poetry Yearbook, this sixtieth issue carries the weight of literary history without becoming trapped by it. Its achievement lies in showing that the yearbook remains necessary, not as a monument, but as a gathering place.

The scale alone is impressive: 138 new poems, 29 reviews, essays and a featured poet, Josiah Morgan. Yet all souls does not feel merely crowded. Slaughter has shaped the issue around an elastic and resonant title, one capacious enough to hold grief, memory, bodies, illness, humour, ancestry, desire, aging and the stubborn shimmer of ordinary life. The result is an anthology that feels alert to darkness without surrendering to it. Many poems move through death, loss, therapy, violence and private fracture, but they also find wit, tenderness, sensuality and renewal in unexpected places.

The title suggests commemoration, but also community: the living and the dead, established poets and emerging voices, lyric interiority and public conversation. A yearbook of this kind has a difficult task. It must register the range of what is being written now without flattening difference into a survey. Here, the variety is part of the pleasure. Some poems work through intimate domestic detail; others stretch towards dream, satire, ecological attention or philosophical unease. The strongest pieces make the reader pause not because they announce significance, but because their images and rhythms quietly disturb the air around them.

Slaughter’s editorial presence is felt in the energy of the selection. The poems do not seem arranged simply to represent categories, but to create echoes and frictions. Light and darkness pass through one another. The body becomes archive, weather system, instrument and witness. Place is similarly active, with Aotearoa appearing not as a fixed literary backdrop but as a set of voices, pressures, histories and contested inheritances.

The reviews are an important part of the volume’s value. In a literary culture where poetry criticism can be sporadic, the yearbook continues to provide serious, attentive engagement with new collections. These pieces broaden the issue beyond anthology into conversation, reminding readers that poetry survives not only through writing and publishing, but through response.

On a personal note, the inclusion of one of my own poems “Māori Diacritics of Love & Hope” adds a small thread to the collection’s wider pattern of language, identity and belonging. It sits among many other voices rather than apart from them, which is perhaps the best thing an anthology can offer a poem: company.

If there is a limitation, it is the inevitable one attached to abundance. Some readers will find the issue best approached slowly, poem by poem, rather than as a continuous reading experience. Not every piece can strike with equal force. Yet this is also why the yearbook matters. Its breadth allows discoveries, returns and changes of temperature.

all souls is a generous and vital anniversary edition. It honours the long history of poetry publishing in Aotearoa while making a clear case for the present moment: restless, grieving, funny, tender, politically awake and alive with language.

Reviewer: Chris Reed

Massey University Press