'What more could you ask for, really?'

A new Nick Ascroft collection is always a thing to celebrate. On Wednesday 3 September we launched the excellent new book It's What He Would've Wanted, which has received advance praise by readers like Shayne Carter ('He's a good man, Nick'), Jenny Bornholdt ('I absolutely loved it'), James Brown ('I pre-ordered a copy'), and Ashleigh Young's brother John-Paul ('He's really good'). 

The book was launched at Unity Books Wellington by fellow poet and the book's editor, Always Becominging, who delivered the following speech/mild roasting.

Excellent whiteboard art by Eden at Unity Books Wellington

A few weeks ago, I ran into a friend of mine at a reading and she said to me, ‘You’re launching Nick’s book.’ Which was true, I had bravely agreed to speak at his launch. She then followed up with, ‘I didn’t know you knew him that well.’ A dagger to my heart. I deflected, told her that I had edited the book and moved the conversation along, but the comment stuck, haunted me that night and every one that followed, activating my imposter syndrome.

I had known Nick for years, but only as an acquaintance. I knew he was a poet and a Scrabble player. I knew he was divorced and had a son. I knew he had always been nice to me, despite that time I was in a bad mood and brushed off his friendly greeting, something that I still carry guilt over. But beyond that, what did I really know about Nick Ascroft? Shit all to be honest. So I decided to do something about it. I committed to reading all of Nick’s poetry collections before the launch and getting to know him through his work, learning how he became the man he is today, how he came to write this book of poetry which I am now here launching to a group of friends, family, publishers, poets, public servants, football fanatics, scrabble fetishists, and acquaintances, most of whom probably know him better than I do myself. Here is what I learned.

Always Becominging. Photo: Chris Tse

It all began twenty-five years ago to the day – well, I didn’t actually check the day, but certainly twenty-five years ago to the year – with the publication of Nick’s first collection, From the Author of, when he was just a tender twenty-six years of age. The title was and remains inspired, as each of his subsequent books begin with a page reading: From the author of From the Author of. Nick stares out at us from the back cover of this debut book with lovely long locks, looking like a prettier Robert Plant.

In at least one way, this book delivered on what we would expect from an Ascroft collection to this day. He was already finding joy in gibberish. He was flimflamming, hurly-burlying and hurdy-gurdying, hullabalooing and ballyhooing, gibble-gabbling, and cockamamie-ing. He was flaffing and wangling, zinging, hic-ing, and hmf-ing. Ahoying, hobbledehoying, and heaving-ho. Tooting and choo chooing. Blithering, flailing, floundering, schlocking and kerfuffling. And honestly, that sums the book up pretty well.

He followed this nonsense up with Nonsense, his self-described ‘difficult sophomore album’. He had physically changed in the intervening three years, transformed from the angelic jester of his first collection to a real man, glancing away from us in his author photo, wearing a black beanie and clenching a cigar between his teeth, looking like a Jack Nicholson impersonator.

Poetically he hadn’t changed so much. In fact, he doubled down on the literary tom-foolery. Remember that litany of onomatopoeia I reeled off a moment ago? Well Nonsense has individual poems with more weird words than that. Plus, he started showing off his Scrabble vocabulary. Perhaps I’m the stupidest person in the room and this won’t land, but what the fuck is a limiculous? What is bombilation? Can anyone but the man himself tell me what micturious means? I’ll give you a clue: I looked it up and turns out it’s something I have a fetish for. He was, in his own words, ‘a poet,/ In the best & pretentiousest sense of the word’.

This book signals the beginning of Nick’s fascination with death, significant given the book we are gathered here to celebrate. It makes sense, he was almost thirty and getting old, or as he put it, ‘On this well-trod path to middle-age poetry’ counting his age in months left to live, so of course he wrote that ‘a personal favourite of mine, is the examination of death & grief, fired particularly here by the death of my last grandparent.’ Well that’s something I’ve learnt about him from my research: all his grandparents are dead. My condolences Nick, but most of us are in the same boat. However, hopefully most of us don’t cremate ourselves out of bed every juddering awful morning like you do or did at that time of your life.

Also important to note: This book features the first Ascroftian sonnets and ends with a series of poems, in which an angry dishwashing machine monologues at an innocent David Elworthy.

 

 

After all that Nonsense, Nick took a thirteen year break, before publishing his third collection, Back with the Human Condition, in 2016. It was his first book to have a non-orange cover, and his first to have an author photo where he looks like himself: standing in the middle of Lambton Quay, wearing a retired-English-lady dressing gown and holding a cup of tea. It was also the first book of Nick’s where I noticed any typos, signalling a decline in what was then VUP’s editorial excellence. You’d have to know Nick better than I do to say what he did in the intervening years. All I know is that upon his return he was no longer doing that old-school thing of capitalising the first letter of every line even when it lands in the middle of a sentence.

Even after being gone for so long, or perhaps because of it, Nick still had death on the mind. In this book he addresses death in all shapes and sizes, from mice to dogs to humans. He even titled a section ‘Death’, though there is proportionately little death in it. And when I say little death, I do mean petite morte, as Ascroft ends the section and the book with the lines: ‘Don’t make me take them off./ Let me have sex in my socks.’ This is important, because when Nick is talking about death in this book, he is really talking about life. Shocking, I know, but true nonetheless. According to him, ‘we sink our teeth into the gristle of living’, ‘we die celebrating’, and ‘It’s humbling and wonderful, to be returned to nothing.’

Although he is ever the maximalist, I would say that this is the collection where Ascroft learnt restraint. In his first two collections he was throwing everything at the wall to see what stuck. Now he had figured out what stuck to walls and only threw that. But of course, he still threw as much of it as he could get his hands on. Though, perhaps I’m wrong as this so-called restraint didn’t stop him from writing a concrete poem in the shape of a goose.

No more extended breaks for Ascroft. His next collection Moral Sloth released in 2019, bearing his most boring author photo yet: a younger version of the man you see here tonight, standing in front of a wall of poor graffiti, with his thumb to his face like so, as if wiping a runny nose.

Honestly, at this point I stopped taking such diligent notes. There was more death and more sonnets; he hinted at his possible bisexuality but couched it in jest; he made mountains out of mole hills and mole holes out of bottomless pits; and every title in the poem ‘What to Avoid Calling My Next Poetry Collection’ was better than the actual title of his next poetry collection, which was The Stupefying and came out in 2022.

Yes, death comes up in the very first poem, but The Stupefying is Nick’s divorce book. This is where he looks back on his relationships. It’s where he gets meta, writing poems referring to poems from previous collections. These are poems set in the distant past: 1972, 1988, 1989, before many of Nick’s friends were born. And we all know that nostalgic poems are poems about the passage of time, and poems about the passage of time are poems about aging, and poems about aging are poems about death. And of course there are the sonnets. Just when you think he’s done with them, when he’s hit you with a thirteen liner, a seventeen liner, and a handful of two pagers: pop pop pop pop pop pop, six sonnets in a row. This guy just walks around writing sonnets and making up words. Who does he think he is? Shakespeare?

Nick Ascroft.

And that brings us back to (or forward to?) tonight, Wednesday, the third of September, 2025, here, Unity Books, 57 Willis Street, the launch of Nick’s sixth collection of poems, It’s What He Would’ve Wanted, and I’m happy to say, it’s more of the same. Floofy language: check. Orange cover: check. Sonnets: check. Poem referencing Ashleigh Young: check. Self-admitted empty wordplay: check. Poem where I have no idea what’s going on: check. Self-deprecating stanza that I tried to get Nick to cut so the poem could end on a moment of beauty but which he insisted on retaining: check. Title poem that Nick first read at Te Papa and tore the house down with, getting me excited for this collection before I even worked at THWUP: check. Words beyond my vocabulary: check. Poem for his friend Niki: check. Fart jokes: check. Poem about Ames (his son, for those of you who know him less well than me): check. Spice Girls reference: check. Making light of death and heavy of life: check.

What more could you ask for really? It’s Nick, doing what he does. Who would want him to do anything else? Yes, he has at times ventured into other ventures – the book on five-a-side football, the self-published science fiction novel – but we don’t speak of them. What we want from Nick are funny poems on the human condition, that condition being dead.

I want to say that this is the book that taught me the most about the meat robot that is Nick Ascroft. That would be a fitting close to this speech, but it would be a lie. I did learn that blood makes Nick faint and that he once shook Allen Curnow’s hand, but that’s about it to be honest.

What I can say is what I knew before I went and read his whole back catalogue: Nick Ascroft is the best rhymer in New Zealand literature. He’s a case of what happens when a poet knows too many words. His poetry ages like cheap wine: it’s just as bad now as it was initially. And he is now perhaps more than an acquaintance to all of us.

Morgan Bach behind a barricade of It's What He Would've Wanteds

 

It's What He Would've Wanted by Nick Ascroft is available here on our website and from all good bookstores from Thursday 11 September 2025.