Description
White-hot heart is the 36th annual anthology of the winners and selected submissions to the New Zealand Poetry Society International Poetry Competition. The 2023 edition contains over 150 poems and haiku by adult and junior poets, both well-known and newcomers, from Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, Nor th America, Canada, India and the United Kingdom. The anthology’s title comes from Susan Wardell’s poem “Radishes,” the winning poem in the adult open competition. Judge, Nina Mingya Powles, commented that this was one of the most surprising poems she read: “It begins in the realms of the every day, but … there are fissures underneath the poem’s surface like a web of roots. The speaker’s assured voice carries the reader unwaveringly to the ‘white-hot heart of it’”. The open junior judge, Robert Sullivan, reported that “judging this poetry competition has been a joy. It brings back my own sheer excitement at the discoveries of poems and their mauri or life force.