In poems by Sarah Lawrence, harold coutts and Arielle Walker, three fresh, vivid voices arrive.

In ‘Clockwatching’, Sarah Lawrence hurtles us into a world full of friends and homes and things, and wonders what they all might leave behind: ‘If it’s toothache or budget / margarine or perhaps / another world altogether.’ harold coutts’ ‘longing’ reflects on gender (‘if gender is a taste i am cutting out my tongue’), bodies (‘pubelessness’) and the rest (‘there isn’t a manual on when you’re writing someone a love poem and they break up with you’). And in ‘river poems’ Arielle Walker steps right into the water – because ‘a poem is a fluid thing all wrapped up in fish skin’ – and finds stories of sealskins, harakeke and thistle, kānuka and mānuka, alder and elder.

Brimming with vivid beauty, the contemporary and the inflections of memory, AUP New Poets 9 shows just what new writing can open up.