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'These are poems where nature is the model, including human nature. ' Elizabeth Nannestad's playful, close observations of wilderness and wild women of several generations are held together by the wind and time shifts. Seventeen years after her last book, Wild Like Me brings back one of the vital...
For as long as there's been poetry in this country there's been landscape. Sometimes there seems to have been little else. And yet for all this familiarity there are questions yet to be answered, attachments and passions that don't let go. John Newton's new collection asks, how does landscape get...
How are we to survive our own lives? Therese Lloyd's poems create a lyrical pathway through the thorny and singular questions of our time. And there, among so much that can be underestimated or go unnoticed, she finds alternative strength and beauty in things. -Bernadette Hall Other Animals is the...
Fleur Adcock's title refers to the transparent, glittering wings of some of the species - bees, mosquitoes, dragonflies - celebrated or lamented in a sequence of poems on encounters with arthropods, from the stick insects and crayfish of her native New Zealand to the clothes' moths that infest her...
In Gleam, Sarah Broom's powerful poems explore the effect of a life-threatening condition by way of the landscapes of the natural world, charting the hardest things in beautiful language. Broom's forte is encapsulating, expressing and making sense of strong internal feeling and turmoil through...
With a characteristic use of vernacular and an active application of his senses as he encounters the world around him, New Zealand Poet Laureate Vincent O'Sullivan produces intensely personal poems in this collection. For all that they brim with insight, however, the poems also concern themselves...
J. C. Beaglehole, historian and Cook scholar, was also a passionate writer of letters. He wrote frequently, at length and throughout his life, to family, friends and colleagues - wittily, affectionately, intimately, eruditely, acerbically, and always with an eye to style - and left a large and rich...
Life & Customs begins and ends in Otago. It circles through places and through history, picking up the rhythms of a maze. It is full of stories: a girl slips into an anorexic silence as cold as Antarctica; lovers wander hand in hand into a southern future. 'The hope thing' emerges as a stubborn...
With pinpoint accuracy, virtuosity and humour, Caoilinn Hughes aligns scientific and poetic venturing. In this striking debut collection she focuses on moments of discovery, from the first controlled nuclear reaction the shape of an avalanche as witnessed from its catchment area. These are...
Marty Smith grew up in remote hill country between Pahiatua and the sea. Although her father and grandmother lived on the same farm, one at each end, her father never spoke to her grandmother in her living memory, and their feud is the subject of quite a few poems. They also look at the effects of...
Twenty-five years ago the Maori Language Act was passed, but research still finds that the Maori language is dying. This collection looks at the state of the language since the Act, how the language is faring in education, media, texts and communities and what the future aspirations for the...
Michele Leggott's new book of poetry follows on from her previous collection, Mirabile Dictu, in its exploration of light and of gathering dark. Leggott is a poet of the lilting, shining moment and in five of the sections here we follow her through her own moments and movements - to Devonport, to...
In this pioneering anthology, two leading Maori poets and scholars collect together the major Maori poetic voices in English and let flow a wellspring of Maori poetry. From revered established writers as well as exciting new voices, the poems in Puna Wai Korero offer a broad picture of Maori poetry...
Compelling and revealing, the often hectic and sometimes poignant tale of the life and times of New Zealand's foremost storyteller. - From The Edge Of The Sky By Maurice Shadbolt
'your self: created, drawn, many times over' From its arresting central image of standing naked before a life-drawing class, The Lonely Nude reveals a speaker who, even as she travels into the world, feels increasingly disconnected from it. With Dobson's characteristic humour and subtlety, the...
The pilgrim poems in this collection persuade the other poems and the readers to join them on a quest for personal meaning. All the while there is the feeling that the movement forward is really towards the place where it all began. There's a Medical Name for This is the second collection by Kerrin...
A land ballot was the means by which Fleur Adcock's grandparents, immigrants from Manchester during World War I, were able to bid for a piece of native bush on the slopes of Mount Pirongia in the North Island of New Zealand. Their task was to turn this unpromising acreage into a dairy farm. When...
'A hundred years are but a moment of sleep,' writes Po, still riding. In her first collection, Frances Samuel leads us into the lives of characters we have not met before in New Zealand poetry. A man with a snorkel trawls fountains for coins; a vending machine produces a sailboat; a zookeeper frees...
In 1905, white supremacist Lionel Terry murdered the Cantonese gold prospector Joe Kum Yung to draw attention to his crusade to rid New Zealand of Chinese and other East Asian immigrants. Chris Tse uses this story - and its reenactment for a documentary a hundred years later - to reflect on the...
For twelve months Deborah Shepard kept a journal to help her with a chronic pain condition. Soon she found herself contemplating all of life's pains and losses, including the devastating earthquakes that shattered her hometown of Christchurch. Searching for a way through, she began observing the...