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Nobody walked in the dusty street

A scent of a dying mimosa flower Lay on the air, but sweet – too sweet.

By Katherine Mansfield (1916)

Why I like it: Like many New Zealanders, I was introduced to Mansfield’s fiction at high school. Even though I took a deeper dive into her work at university, I didn’t come across her poetry. This year, which marks the centenary of her death, I’ve decided to invest some time in her poetry. Many of the hallmarks of her fiction are present: her crisp language and masterful control of imagery can be seen in Sanary, which simmers with pent-up energy like the sweltering day it describes. In the poem’s second stanza, Mansfield describes the sun and sky as a spider and its suffocating web, an image and metaphor that wouldn’t feel out of place in one of her stories.

Read more: A number of collections of Mansfield’s poetry were published after her death. The Collected Poems of Katherine Mansfield, edited by Gerri Kimber and Claire Davison (Otago University Press, 2016), is an illuminating survey of her verse and includes previously unseen work from her archives.