Everything Talks is AUP's first collection of poetry by up-and-coming Auckland poet Sam Sampson. Organised in sections ('An Arena of Reflected Caches', 'Mirror Mirror', 'Orpheus at Whatipu', 'Frisson', 'The Dirty Monk', 'The Deep End'), ""Everything Talks"" has a resonant overall cohesiveness; the poems are original and contradictory: earthy, cryptic, exquisite in turn. Sampson has an ear for the lilting phrase, and his poems - 'attuned to the day's inflections' - have a gentle ebb and flow, which is often echoed visually by the way the poems are laid out upon the page. This tidal lyricism is never fragile or overly lavish and often a marvellous stanza is undercut - 'sounds are askew' - by a laconic expression or surprisingly forthright final image.Experimental in form, this is poetry that rewards an immersed and slow read. Sampson's poems are also grounded in his environment, often the West Coast of Auckland where he grew up. Karekare, the Manukau Harbour and the Waitakere Ranges all feature, but in poems that reach from ancient Egypt to fifteenth-century France to nineteenth-century Tahiti to the United States in 1963, while touching on biography, archaeology, astronomy, Sampson also proves that he can handle global ideas and universal concerns.