Broom's Tigers at Awhitu is an immensely powerful debut collection, which enters directly into the vicinities of darkness, light, and the spaces in-between. Its poems are often situated under conditions of extreme pressure. In their natural environments, winds crack, ransack, lunge and whine, the sun cracks and plunges, the ocean loses its footing. In their human environments, a swimmer narrowly escapes drowning, a man waits desperately for rescue on Everest and, at the book's core, the poet is confronted and pursued by threatening extremes of illness. However, moments of joy, love and light are never far away in the pages of this book, and when Broom turns her attention to these, her work shines in a different way: like seeing great strength used to cradle a baby or play something tender and beautiful on a musical instrument.

Broom's poems are resilient and firmly planted. Taut and limber, they bend but do not break beneath the sometimes enormous weight of their imagery and subject matter. In 'The Plain', for example, the speaker engages with, listens to, and moves through an almost unfathomably harsh environment:

I crawl forward on knees and elbows

I think the sharp grass is talking to me
telling me of a time when breath came easy

And in 'Hospital Property', in which the poet speaks frankly about her devastating cancer diagnosis and treatment, her view remains fixed on the future: 'No, but wait. Watch what happens now.'

These poems and others positively vibrate with tenacity and bravery in the face of terrifying circumstances, and as such they constitute a deep centre of gravity in this collection. But they are set in a wider context in which poems also express happiness that is at times sheer and sudden (as in the poem 'Red Sail', in which a bright red sail encapsulates elements of a mother's joy), at times gentle and contemplative (as in 'The Island', in which the poet addresses her unborn child with the gentle tones and rhythms of a lullaby), and at times understated and vast; as in these lines from 'Matakawau', the book's final poem, and in one in which Broom displays her characteristically striking landscape imagery:

when the sea pulls this far out
the world is simply tender

the mudflats gleam,
the shellfish click and gurgle

birds call out across
a barely possible openness

The co-existing presence of poems such as these, while not altering the impact or effect of others, ensures that even at its darkest moments there is never an absence of light or of hope in this collection.