Twenty Contemporary New Zealand Poets is the first anthology in decades to present to British readers the remarkable freshness and vitality of New Zealand poetry. Starting in the mid-1980s, it captures turning points in the work of Allen Curnow and Bill Manhire, poets who have made a mark across the English-speaking world, and charts the advent of a new wave of writers who recombine influences from all over to investigate the self and language with passion, intelligence and humour.

Taking their cue from the 1960s generation of poets who jettisoned the idea of a single tradition, writers such as Jenny Bornholdt, Dinah Hawken, Michele Leggott and James Brown play freely with lyric expectations, extending the boundaries of poetry through constant formal innovation, intellectual inquiry and a fierce but fond attention to the uniquenessof everyday life and speech in New Zealand.

A vital part of this distinctive body of work is its dialogue with social and political change, in recent poetry by Glenn Colquhoun, Robert Sullivan, Anne Kennedy and Tusiata Avia that finds new ways to talkabout the richness and the challenge of living in a bicultural and multicultural society.