With six volumes of poetry and a considerable body of critical work to his credit, Robert Sullivan (*1967) is arguably the most significant Maori poet after “Grand Old Man” Hone Tuwhare (*1922), whose mantle he looks set to inherit. Sullivan can definitely be rated one of the most significant figures in current New Zealand literature as a whole. At the same time, he has emerged over the last two decades as a distinct and distinctive political presence, a powerful public advocate of human rights, especially those of indigenous peoples. He is a firm believer in, and practitioner of, the power of words, deeply committed to empowering the “first people” of Aotearoa New Zealand by verbalizing their concerns. Sullivan has been aptly described as an author who “furnishes Maori identity with a new voice, sophisticated yet passionate.” He puts that authentic and authoritative voice at the service of articulating issues and concerns that go far beyond his individual sense of belonging (or not belonging)—to family, both nuclear and extended, or to ethnic and cultural group. Whether it is a matter of re-inscribing the landscape, of re-interpreting the text of the Treaty of Waitangi, or of squaring up to the Prime Minister on the Foreshore and Seabed Act, Sullivan’s central, and eminently postcolonial, project is the rewriting of rights, the righting of wrongs, the re-wording of the world. In this paper I will be exploring the poetics of Sullivan’s politics, in particular his continuation of the oral tradition by other means.