How can language contain the world that spillsFrom its torn rinds, how can my ode holdOn to language that ejects itself like birdsongFrom pine trees still shady with dawn . . . ‘To Mount Victoria’, The Commonplace OdesIan Wedde has been a major presence in New Zealand poetry since his work began appearing in journals in the late 1960s. His first book of poetry appeared in 1971; his sixth book won the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry in 1978; his sixteenth and most recent was a finalist in 2014....
Opal Sunset gathers together fifty years of Clive James's poetry, and will undoubtedly enhance his reputation as one of the most versatile and accomplished of contemporary writers. Indeed -- as with Other Passports, The Book of My Enemy and Angels Over Elsinore before it -- Opal Sunset proves Clive James to be as well suited to the intense demands of the poetic form as he is to prose. Readers new to his verse will not be surprised to find him a master of the comic set-piece and surreal excursion...
The clearly-focussed lyrics of Les Murray's Waiting for the Past are rich in topographies and the languages peculiar to them - wonga vines, lyre birds, gum trees, shrike thrushes, tallow boughs, boab trees, the octopus in Wylies Baths killed by sterilising chlorine. With the erasures the modern world brings, words, landscapes and lives descend to the Esperanto of the modern. The poet, with a salutary resistance, rejects the computer and the incursions of the levelling Modern in favour of old-f...
Barefoot is Kevin Hart's eighth collection of poems; it is rich in elegies, meditations on lost love, and celebrations of new love. The title speaks of mourning, pilgrimage, and the direct sensuous contact of flesh with earth. Harold Bloom has long extolled Hart as a "visionary of desire," and in this collection we find that vision deepened and that desire extended. Never before has Hart stretched his range of inspiration quite so far; while continuing to draw from Christianity, he also responds...
Another original, delightful book of poems from the winner of the poetry section in the 2004 Montana Book Awards. This new work, also a sequence, is much less tied to the poet's own experience. Wonderfully inventive and both disturbing and amusing, it focuses on a family of giants and in particular the daughter and her efforts to conceal from her lover (normal size) just how tall she really is. This tale also includes gentle satire on contemporary manners, witty language play and a warm and aff...
Extraordinary insights about love, loss and living Think of Beau Taplin as capturing the essence of love and heartbreak, challenges and paradoxes, yearning and fulfilment, and attaching that to magical, majestic life. Beautiful, inspiring and empowering, Beau Taplin's poems sweep readers away on a journey of emotion. When you need advice, wisdom, something for your soul, Beau offers insight and balm.
Elizabeth Nannestad’s playful, close observations of wilderness and wild women of several generations are held together by the wind and time shifts. With broad, encompassing sweep of history, untamed places, and the people who inhabit them, Wild Like Me marks the return of one of the more vital voices of New Zealand poetry.
