Poetry Books

Discover the tips and tricks to avoiding the rejection pile. You've done it! You've written the next "must have" book and everyone you know who reads your manuscript agrees it's guaranteed to be a bestseller. So why can't you find a publisher for it? For some reason (maybe even more than one)...

Contending that James K. Baxter's use of Greek myth is close to the heart of his poetic vision, this book draws on the subject's entire career, mounting the first-ever sustained investigation of his vast corpus of unpublished poems. Baxter's mythic figures and ambiguous symbols are explored, to...

Rhian Gallagher's second collection - her first with a New Zealand publisher - encompasses a departure from London, where she lived for 18 years, and a return to her country of birth. In three parts, Shift takes us both back and outwards - from the poet's early history out towards the wider world -...

Offering a rich harvest of recent poems, this collection displays the wit, intellectual agility, and arresting beauty for which the author is renowned. This anthology is full of stories that confront personal subjects as well as broader topics-family, friendship, death, war, and the repeating...

This book is a gift to and a celebration of Roger Robinson. If you have not heard of him when you pick it up, you will come to know him for the extraordinary man of many worlds that he is, above all, as befits a champion runner and a professor of English, the worlds of running and writing. It is...

'My poems don't start from ideas, but from bits of language, maybe a turn of phrase that's like a tune that plays over and over in my mind. A poem can often be like a game in my head where I want to think about something I don't fully understand. Recently a child said to me, "I'm not me. I'm...

Captain Cook in the Underworld is a book-length poem by a gifted Maori poet, an archetypal exploration of Western mythology and legend as it 'discovers' itself in the South Pacific. The poem was commissioned as the libretto for a new work with composer John Psathas for the fiftieth anniversary...

In the spacious opening sequence, "King's Lynn & the Pacific" the poet finds moving connections between King's Lynn in Norfolk and the distant Pacific via two of Cook's voyages. A central mixed group, "Creation, etc", includes some more Catullus poems, using Stead's favourite mouthpiece for satire,...

In these 56 letters to his slightly older friend, then imprisoned as a conscientious objector, the teenage James K. Baxter pours out his ideas and feelings on life, philosophy and his own work. With the inclusion of the complete texts of the 255 poems written at the time and discussed in the...

Elizabeth Smither is recognized as one of New Zealand's leading poets. This is a generous selection from eight of Elizabeth Smither's earlier collections, along with 33 new poems. The poems appear mostly in chronological order but some of the new poems occur early in the book; and one or two older...

The major New Zealand novelists of the 1980s have begun to receive international acclaim. This first critical study of Janet Frame, Keri Hulme, Witi Ihimaera, Maurice Gee, Ian Wedde, and C. K. Stead concentrates on their important works to explore how deeply-rooted anxieties about New...

This volume contains a selection of recent material from the New Zealand poet Elizabeth Smither, who is known for the restraint and distinctive poise of her writing. AccoladesWinner of New Zealand Book Award Poetry Category 1990. - A Pattern Of Marching By Elizabeth Smither (Paperback)

In this second collection Richard Reeve shows a strengthening, maturing talent and fully justifies his growing reputation. His fiercely independent voice, often dark, macabre, sardonic, angry, is powerful and dramatic. The focus on the natural world of South Island bush and mountain and on...

Ta Matou Mangai By Hone Kouka. - Ta Matou Mangai By Hone Kouka

There is a poem in As Far As I Can See (AUP, 1999) that imagines a future time: They gave me flowers and asked where I would go. To open the eyes of the soul, I said. There is a way but this is only the first gate. 'Milk and Honey' is a dance to the music of that future time. It looks back and...

A new collection of poetry by a self-confessed 'ranter', Fast Talker is energetic, contemporary, and filled with an emphatic, punchy political and social awareness. Some of the poems are indeed Eggleton's well-known 'rants' - part showman patter, part incantation, part prophetic diatribe - that...

The Black River collects C K Stead's most recent poems, written over the last eighteen months. The brilliant and moving focus of the collection is its final sequence, written after Stead suffered a stroke which temporarily affected his ability to read and write. Here fragmentary poems poignantly...

This wonderful new collection The Pop-up Book of Invasions is written out of Fiona Farrell's experience in Ireland on the Rathcoola Writer's Residency in 2006. The poems draw heavily and vividly on the landscape, history and mythology of Ireland, sharing a sense of discovery, but they also make...

A collection writing from Bill Manhire which includes poetry, interviews and autobiographical essays. - Doubtful Sounds By Bill Manhire

This anthology of New Zealand poetry in an energetic, iconoclastic and innovative period, draws on small magazines and obscure collections as well as better known work. The editors were major participants in the revolutionary scene, especially as founders of the magazine ""Freed"". The collection...