In her first collection, Dream Fish Floating, Karlo Mila walks a line between simplicity and ordinariness. Because her poems are so fluid – so accessible and lacking in self-conciousness, Mila sounds at times like any other poetic young woman, writing in a journal, for example.

Some editors might take her 139 pages and reduce them to 39. Others, most obviously her publisher Huia, just let Mila’s voice be what it is: unadorned, at times unsophisticated, but honest, revealing and ultimately, a total that offers more than the sum of its parts.

According to jacket copy, Mila grew up in Palmerston North and now lives in Auckland. She is also ‘of Tongan, Palangi and Samoan descent.’ As a result, perhaps, her poems are a mix of the exotic and the banal. Here are love poems, poems about a palangi mother and her doomed mixed marriage, odes of praise to teachers and friends, commentaries on Paul Holmes’ apology to the nation and one tree hill, visits to Tonga and the suburbs of Auckland.

As is usually the case, Mila’s strongest works are those that bear the mark of her own individuality: those with words and language we have not read before. Compare these lines in For Ida (first Pacific woman judge)

The gulls circle
and nest
and our sense of selves
rests.

You touch a vision
clasped to the breast
of humble women buried in humble villages
who still sing
across oceans of memory…

with the more distinctive sketch in the poem on seeing someone who… (didn’t see me) (for Simon)

…we looked liked ordinary people
enjoying a beer while listening to
a violinist on speed
and a drugged up didgeridoo
and then I saw you – encountered you
coming out of the loos – politely explaining
that one of the toilets was out of order
and I hid behind my hair
hoping you wouldn’t recognise me.

In this case, it is the ordinary people that stay with us, that make an impact.

Sometimes, Mila could afford to be more ruthless with her work, casting off the generic poems and concentrating on what is hers alone. This can be hard, especially when simplicity is her strength. But when it works, it works: in her poem Missed, for example, in which she compares her lover to milk in her coffee; or in The Grass is Greener when she states her case most plainly:

if I am completely honest
the whole time I was with you
I was wondering if something better would come along.

Karlo is appearing in the upcoming Auckland Writers and Readers Festival.