'These are poems that are as alive to the darkness of motherhood as they are to its frantic joys.'

 Debutants

[...] Of these nine poets, however, two, finally, stand out.

[...] Sarah Broom's Tigers at Awhitu boasts a similar coherence, but her subjects are harder darker. In 2008, twenty-nine weeks pregnant with her third child, Broom was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer and told that her life could be measured in months. Friends sent out the half-finished manuscript of Tigers while she was in hospital and it was accepted for publication; once released, she completed it, and the result is astonishing. These are poems that are as alive to the darkness of motherhood ('I am a land picked over and over by birds // now everything is dust') as they are to its frantic joys ('oh the butter on my chin, buttercup, / the sheen, the shine on a lick of paint, yes luck again / the smell of rain'); to the vividness of illness as well as its cruelty.

With a book such as this, it's crucial to ask whether we are responding to the poems or the poet's story, but in Broom's case, there's no cause for squeamishness. Certainly there are some (particularly the wrenching 'because the world can do that to you', in which she faces the possibility of leaving her children), in which the whump of the subject matter leaves you gasping, but it's testament to her ability that collection's impact resides as much in the power of images of the 'subdued muffins' in a hospital coffee shop as it does in the fact of the hospital itself. Broom is currently defying her doctors' initial predictions. May she continue to do so, and keep writing.