Poetry Books

Collected fiction about Antarctica, Bill Manhire's icy passion; With writing by Jules Vern, Ursula Le Guin, Denis Glover and Monty Python; this is a collection of international standard. - The Wide White Page By Bill Manhire

"The Book of Nadath" is a long prose poem by well-known poet and novelist Robin Hyde which has remained unpublished for 60 years. Written in 1937, Hyde's last year in New Zealand, it is a sounding device for all the concerns which mark "The Godwits Fly", "A Home in This World" and "Nor the Years...

Author BiographyOne of New Zealand's finest poets and prose writers, Brian Turner was the Te Mata Poet Laureate in 2005. He is the author of numerous volumes of poetry and a very fine memoir. He lives in Oturehua, in central Otago's Maniototo district. - Taking Off By Brian Turner

In this provocative collection of poetry, the issue of mental illness is dealt with frankly through pieces that are at once confrontational and refreshing. Written with a dramatic edge that showcases the author's background in theater, the urgency of the bloom of the world's fastest flower-the...

In the year of the bicycle, James Brown cycled to the International Institute of Modern Letters every morning to work as the Victoria University Writer in Residence, and in the weekends took to the hills. These exuberant, intelligent poems are the result. - The Year Of The Bicycle By James, Brown

Eight years after her last, prize-winning, collection, The Lark Quartet, this is a new book of poems from a major poet. The Year of Adverbs is full of the stuff of daily life, fizzing with personalities, alive with incidents and travelling from New Plymouth to Paris and back again. There is a...

A collection of the work of 28 young and mid-career poets - who came to prominence in the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s - notable for their variety, their fresh approaches to poetic form and subject - and their distinctive but complementary voices. This book is a companion to the bestselling Classic...

The enigmatic figure of John Mulgan remains a striking presence in New Zealand culture, his sole novel, Man Alone (1939), one of the classic landmarks of a mature and independent New Zealand literature. His second book, Report on Experience, published posthumously in 1947, is one of the most...

This book brings together Ken Duncum's three plays about the intersection of popular overseas music culture with New Zealand society, each of them showing a slice of Kiwi kids seeking an identity and a relationship to the world through different ways of dressing, talking, posing and thinking...

Gregory O'Brien's first collection of poems since Afternoon of an Evening Train (2005), Beauties of the Octagonal Pool is centred on the 'octagonal pool' of the Waitemata Harbour. In an eight-armed embrace, Beauties of the Octagonal Pool collects poems written from and out of a variety of times,...

"The ship was now drawing away from the land and pointing out across the round curve of the Pacific, behind us the last of the Gulf islands with the sun shining on its high bush hills and steep cliffs, beyond that again the blue line of the land, well down in the sea. I knew that last island and...

In the seven long-ish poems of her new collection, multi-talented writer Anne Kennedy explores past and present, here and there, north and south, earth and paradise, hello and goodbye. In unfolding couplets, 'The Darling North' engages with a woman's past, her lover, her new landscapes, exploring...

This striking first collection (in English) mixes powerful lyrics, Serbian proverbs and literary experiments, and moves from the Balkan wars to New Zealand. - Birds Of Clay By Aleksandra Lane

In his new collection, Harry Ricketts finds room for three songs written in Hong Kong in 1975, and a 1979 poem about a War poet. Other poems remember departed friends and early experiences, and celebrate the abiding pleasure of reading, writing and cricket. Formally adroit, Just Then is by turns...

James Brown's fifth book of poetry moves through personal lyrics, narrative desire and short takes, before arriving at a climactic anti-poetry. Along the way, it climbs rock, reviews CDs and joins the blond revolution. Warm Auditorium is Brown at his most formally diverse, taking tea with rhyme,...

The great Japanese poet Basho is just one of the shades that haunt the vividly precise yet deeply mysterious poems in Geoff Cochrane's new collection. Geoff Cochrane is the author of numerous highly regarded collections of poems, two novels and two collections of short stories. In 2009 he was...

If 'Mother won't come to us', New Zealanders must go to 'Mother' . . . In alien yet strangely familiar territory, a place her ancestors 'got off', what must an expat in England do to survive? Score herself a bedsit, work in a pub, hunt up an office job - and keep an eye out . . . Set on the cusp of...

This new collection by Albert Wendt moves from the warm valley winds of Hawai'i to the seasons of a garden in Auckland. From Manoa to a Ponsonby Garden is a collection of poignant, extraordinary poems - alert and self-confident, challenging of literary conventions, rough-hewn yet imbued with...

From Polynesian Mythology to the Yates' Garden Guide, from Allen Curnow to Alice Tawhai, from Wiremu Te Rangikaheke's letters to Katherine Mansfield's notebooks, Maori and Pakeha New Zealanders have struggled for two and a half centuries to work the English language into some sort of truth about...

Magnificent Moon is the eagerly awaited debut collection from one of the new stars of New Zealand poetry. Ashleigh Young's poems have been appearing in magazines for 10 years. She gained an MA in Creative Writing with Distinction from the International Institute of Modern Letters in 2009, winning...