Poetry

A Place to Go On From

Dunedin poet Iain Lonie (1932–1988), a Cambridge scholar who enjoyed an international reputation as a medical historian, died before his poetry was fully appreciated. He published five slim volumes but his style was not the one that dominated New Zealand poetry at the time. And yet, argues Damian Love in an essay in this volume, ‘To read him now is, for most of us, practically to discover a new resource.’ This collection, assembled from sources public and private, is the result of poet David Howard’s determination to rescue a memorable body of work from oblivion. As well as the poems from Lonie’s published volumes, it includes over a hundred unpublished works, two essays and an extensive commentary. While his keen interest in mortality was focused by the premature death of his wife Judith (aged 46), Lonie’s poetry is also an attempt to recover the loved in us all. As he eavesdrops on desire and grief he reports back, often wittily, leaving the most poised body of elegiac poetry New Zealand has. For younger poets, Iain Lonie’s poetry has become ‘a place to go on from’.

A Wind Harp

A Wind Harp features the voice and lyrics of Cilla McQueen, supported by original music from Dunedin musicians, The Blue Neutrinos..

Alzheimer's and a Spoon

Alzheimer's and a Spoon is the highly original first collection of poetry from Liz Breslin, whose writing is described by former New Zealand poet laureate Vincent O'Sullivan as displaying 'sheer brio and linguistic flair.'

As the Verb Tenses

'As the Verb Tenses' is the work of a reflective and sensitive poetic talent: one run with gleaming wires of joy. In poems that gather together the vivid details of childhood memory, the surreal juxtapositions of life in the contemporary West, the wry observations of a temporary expatriate, the deeply lodged pain of historical and personal loss, Lynley Edmeades speaks to us in delicately spun lines that press out ironies, dissonances and profound formative experience.

At the Point of Seeing

At the Point of Seeing is the extraordinary debut collection from Ōtepoti Dunedin poet Megan Kitching. Poised, richly observant and deftly turned, Kitching’s poems bestow a unique attention upon the world, especially to those weedy, overgrown and pest-infested places where the human impulse to name, control and colonise meet nature’s life force and wild exuberance. These compelling poems urge the reader to slow down and give space to the living, moving, breathing environment that surrounds them.

Axis

Cilla McQueen is one of New Zealand's major poets (New Zealand Book Award for Poetry three times). Axis is a selection of her poems from the past twenty years, drawn from five volumes of her published work: Homing In (1982), Anti Gravity (1984), Wild Sweets (1986), Benzina (1988), and Crik'ey (1993). The poems are interspersed with drawings she produced on the same themes or subjects. Also included are Cilla's musical scores: of 'singing landscapes' and 'conversations in crowded rooms', for example.

Born to a Red-Headed Woman

Using the extraordinary capacity of music to revive the places and people from our pasts, this poetic memoir springs from over 50 song titles or song lines and spans more than four decades.

Brass Band to Follow

Bryan Walpert’s fourth collection of lyric poems ranges in its focus from flowers to infinities, from laundry to eternity, but is founded most fully on what it is to move into middle age – to wait still for life’s promised brass band to arrive.

Charles Brasch: Selected Poems

Charles Brasch (1909–1973) was the founder and first editor of Landfall, New Zealand’s premier journal of literature and ideas. Born in Dunedin, he grew up to be at home in the literature, art and architecture of Europe, but returned to devote his life to the arts in his own country – as editor, critic, collector and patron. Brasch’s vocation, however, was to be a poet. As he said in his memoir Indirections, in writing poems he ‘discovered New Zealand … because New Zealand lived in me as no other country could live, part of myself as I was part of it, the world I breathed and wore from birth, my seeing and my language.’ This selection shows his journey of discovery, as Charles Brasch learned by reading poets such as Rilke, W.B. Yeats and Robert Graves to find his own voice as ‘a citizen of the English language’. It is presented as a beautifully bound cased edition.

Cloudboy

Cloudboy is a deep-mulling, richly sensitive account of a mother’s adjustments to the needs of an autistic child. This prize-winning suite of poems grows out of extremes of love and frustration, as the poet introduces a bright, unpredictable, markedly individual boy to the rigid, often airless routines of the school system.

Collected Poems

OUT OF PRINT: To Ruth Dallas, words are as much a part of the natural world as are beech trees, seashells and mountains. It is no accident, therefore, that much of her work should be rooted in the New Zealand landscape, reflecting its rhythms, seasons, its benevolence and its harshness, and its effect on men and women.

Deadpan

Deadpan by James Norcliffe is a new collection of poetry from one of New Zealand’s authors, the work of a mature and technically astute poet

Deep Colour

Deep Colour, by acclaimed poet Diana Bridge, is a fiercely sensory and meticulously crafted collection. These prismatic poems, including some exquisite English translations of fifth-century classical Chinese poetry, respond with graceful precision to the immediate physical world, and meditate on time, beauty and the nature of being.

Diaspora and the Difficult Art of Dying

OUT OF PRINT: Every poem in this collection offers a stepping stone or resting place on what is essentially a diasporic odyssey. Mishra's is a poetry of discontinuities, of sojourning, of not staying put; it traces the lines of an eccentric cartography, moving restlessly from Fiji to Scotland, to Australia, to New Zealand, to Malta, to Italy and back. It is similarly unsettled in its approach to motifs and forms: a sequence of sonnets jostles with a terza rima; free verse stands alongside a sufi parable. There are poems about poetry, colonialism, photography, food, Palestine, the Pacific, and most of all about people.

Edgeland and other poems

Edgeland is the dazzling new collection from leading New Zealand poet David Eggleton

Edwin’s Egg and other poetic novellas

Cilla McQueen was New Zealand Poet Laureate 2009–11. One of her writing projects during her time as laureate was Serial, which she described as ‘exploring a space between prose and poetry’. It was published in chapters on the Poet Laureate website. Retitled Edwin’s Egg and other poetic novellas, this work is now published for the first time in hard-copy format, combining McQueen’s evocative text with wonderful images from the collection of the Alexander Turnbull Library.

Every Now and Then I Have Another Child

A mysterious doppelgänger sister, a newborn baby, a boy in a mural, a detective, a former lover, a student stalker ... are they real or imagined? Building on Diane Brown’s tradition of extended poetic narratives, Every Now and Then I Have Another Child is an inventive and heartfelt meditation on motherhood, the creative impulse and the blurred line between imagination and reality. This delightful, evocative poetic narrative wafts between the truly surreal and the ‘everyday’ absurd.

Feeding the Dogs

OUT OF PRINT: This bumper collection of 60 poems is autobiographical and in it Cooke writes about town, landscape, family and everyday life. 'Feeding the Dogs' is one of the poems in this book. There are other rural poems, such as 'I love this farm so much I could pat it', but Kay Cooke is equally at home writing a well-made poem about lawn bowlers in Queenstown, a family reunion, global warming or biotechnology. Cooke's work is strong and confident. On top of that, she has a particular southern sensibility that is very appealing and recognizable. Cooke writes that her poems come from the 'sense of isolation that I felt living on a farm in Otama Valley, with tussock-covered hills and no shops and bus trips to school.'

Fire-Penny

OUT OF PRINT: Snapshot reconstructions of life on Scotland's remote St Kilda island - ancestral home of the McQueens - open this tenth collection of poetry from Cilla McQueen. The spare life in this place of birds and sea and weather leads into a new set of poems from the poet's Bluff home, quiet observations on friends and animals, memories and dreams, and weather. Many of the reflective poems are conversational in style; one poem is written in the form of a play, and another appears at first to be a dictionary definition. Even the simplest of topics, such as eating cake or meeting a newborn baby, are taken by McQueen and transformed into thoughtful works.

Generation Kitchen

Much sought after by oil companies, ‘generation kitchens’ are sites where geological forces have combined to create conditions for oil production. By turns brooding and wittily observant, Richard Reeve’s fifth book of poetry meditates on the intrigues of fossil fuel companies and ecological despoliation, but also on personal rites of passage – on relationships, deaths, the turn of the seasons. Comic monologues, spiritual invocations, flung swearwords, elegies, eulogies, wind tunnel diatribes and fanciful phantasmagorias co-exist in this collection. Oracular and bardic, Reeve’s work is also paradoxically down to earth and gritty. He knows that, beyond the geopolitical framework, beyond the anthropocene moment, the landscape endures, as in the poem ‘Warrington Dives’: 'the bright / swell bending around the coast, prodding the dark, / clouds of sediment thrown up by a wave …'

Getting It Right

After establishing a poetic presence on the literary scene in the early 1960s, Dunedin’s Alan Roddick published his first collection, 'The Eye Corrects: Poems 1955–1965', in 1967. A mere 49 years later comes the sequel, 'Getting it Right'. Poet C.K. Stead writes in 'Shelf Life' (AUP, 2016) that he has always been 'a great admirer of the economy and the quiet, sharp wit of [Roddick’s] writing ... Alan Roddick is a \

Ghosts

Poet Siobhan Harvey’s latest collection is about migration, outcasts, the search for home, and the ghosts we live with, including the ones who occupy our memories, ancestries and stories.

In a Slant Light

In this absorbing poetic memoir of her early life, Cilla McQueen, one of New Zealand’s major women poets, leads us over the stepping stones of childhood memory, some half submerged, some strong and glinting in the light of her wit. With humour and openness, clarity and grace, the memoir continues through her teenage years and the excitement and turbulence, the expansion and vulnerability, of university days and early motherhood in the 1960s and 1970s ... raising a young child alone, falling in love with Ralph Hotere and witnessing his deeply immersive artistic practice ... This account of the life of an extraordinary verbal artist is immensely warm and welcoming: time falls away as we read. The lightness of Cilla’s touch coupled with the grit of her endurance through challenging personal circumstances makes the reader feel privileged to be invited in to the quiet wisdom worn here with both integrity and modesty. From the sweet shocks of her imagery to the joy of recognition of many shared experiences of a New Zealand childhood, this memoir brings a honeyed, sensitive yet utterly resilient voice in our local literature as close as the voice of a good friend. This is a book not only for those who love Cilla McQueen’s poetry, but for anyone fascinated by the social, artistic and literary history of New Zealand.

Ko Aotearoa Tātou | We Are New Zealand

In the aftermath of the Christchurch terrorist attacks of 15 March 2019, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern declared: ‘We are all New Zealanders.’ These words resonated, an instant meme that asserted our national diversity and inclusiveness and, at the same time, issued a rebuke to hatred and divisiveness. Ko Aotearoa Tātou | We Are New Zealand is bursting with new works of fiction, nonfiction, poetry and visual art created in response to the editors’ questions: What is New Zealand now, in all its rich variety and contradiction, darkness and light? Who are New Zealanders?

Landfall 240: Spring 2020

Landfall 240; Featuring the winners of the Landfall Essay Competition 2020, Caselberg Trust International Poetry Prize 2020 and the Frank Sargeson Prize 2020.

Landfall 241: Autumn 2021

Results from the 2021 Charles Brasch Young Writers’ Essay Competition

Landfall 242: Spring 2021

Landfall is New Zealand’s foremost and longest-running arts and literary journal. It showcases new fiction and poetry, as well as biographical and critical essays, and cultural commentary. Edited by Lynley Edmeades.

Landfall 243: Autumn 2022

Announcing the winner of the 2022 Charles Brasch Young Writers’ Essay Competition. Exciting contemporary art and writing

Landfall 244: Spring 2022

Landfall is New Zealand’s foremost and longest-running arts and literary journal. Published twice a year, each volume showcases two full-colour art portfolios and brims with vital new fiction, poetry, cultural commentary, reviews, and biographical and critical essays. In the 2022 Spring edition, Landfall 244, Lynley Edmeades brings together a range of voices and perspectives, from established practitioners to emerging voices.

Landfall 245: Autumn 2023

Landfall is Aotearoa’s foremost and longest-running arts and literary journal. Each volume showcases two full-colour art portfolios and brims with vital new fiction, poetry, cultural commentary, reviews, and biographical and critical essays. Landfall 245, Autumn 2023 edition, announces the winner of the 2023 Charles Brasch Young Writers’ Essay Competition and features exciting new literature and art.

Landfall 246

Edited by Lynley Edmeades Announces the winner of the 2023 Landfall Essay Competition, Kathleen Grattan Poetry Award and 2023 Caselberg Trust International Poetry Prize Aotearoa’s longest-running arts and literary journal Showcases exciting new contemporary art and writing Paperback, 230 x 150mm, 208pp ISBN 9781990048647, RRP $30 Release date: 27 November 2023

Letter to 'Oumuamua

In Letter to ‘Oumuamua, James Norcliffe applies a cool, clear eye to human life on Earth and makes succinct observations that traverse the personal and political. Grounded in the local but encompassing the global, they range through subjects such as commuting, insomnia and faltering health to the contemplation of current events and issues such as gun violence and climate change.

Letters of Denis Glover

In this magnificent volume Sarah Shieff presents around 500 of Glover’s letters to around 110 people, drawn from an archive of nearly 3000 letters to over 430 recipients.

Listening In

Listening In by Lynley Edmeades is the second collection of poetry from a significant new writer.

Made for Weather

OUT OF PRINT: Cooke's theme, like Robin Hyde's, is one of finding 'a home in this world': hers is an authentic poetry of place, with a fidelity to experience comparable to that of other more established poets such as Bernadette Hall or Brian Turner. Poems contain an array of striking images, developed from Cooke's exposure as a child and adolescent to the wind-whipped coastline of Orepuki, now a ghost town on the eastern fringe of Te WaewaeBay, near Fiordland.

Manifesto Aotearoa: 101 political poems

Explosive new poems for election year from David Eggleton, Cilla McQueen, Vincent O’Sullivan, Tusiata Avia, Frankie McMillan, Brian Turner, Paula Green, Ian Wedde, Vaughan Rapatahana, Ria Masae, Peter Bland, Louise Wallace, Bernadette Hall, Airini Beautrais and 84 others, featuring original artwork by Nigel Brown

Markings

In this fine collection of poems and drawings Cilla McQueen traces the lives and voyages of her ancestors, and the living history of her husband’s people. She herself travels through the fire that destroys her home at Otakou, the autoclave of the central poem, tying together the separate threads of her journey and moving from one harbour to another. The sea is a constant element and balancing this are the poet’s precisely observed images of domestic life and her fascination with the forms and inhabitants of the land.

Millionaire's Shortbread

OUT OF PRINT: Millionaire's Shortbread is both book and cake. Meeting at a cafe table in downtown Wellington, sustained by their favourite treat and gathering in an illustrator along the way, the poets put together this selection of their work over three years. It seemed inevitable that the book should be named after the cake, and the distinctive voices of the poets become its flavoursome ingredients.

Naming the Beasts

Naming the Beasts is a menagerie of poems about the gnarlier aspects of being a creature of this world. Hoof and hide, fang and gut, these images and insights are those of an artist in a war zone intent on chronicling beauty in a world that’s falling apart. Morton’s poems take a bite out of the world around us, as they explore reality through the vitality and immersiveness of their imaginative powers.

Next

Written in the eighth and ninth decades of his life, Alan Roddick’s third collection of poetry, Next, examines the past, observes the present and speculates on the future.

Night School

Winner of the Kathleen Grattan Poetry Award 2021, poet Michael Steven’s Night School explores the gap between fathers and sons, the effects of toxic masculinity, how power corrupts and corrodes, and whether weed, art and aroha can save us in a godless world.

Nothing for it but to Sing

Michael Harlow’s poems are small detonations that release deeply complex stories of psychological separations and attractions, of memory and desire. Frequently they slip into the alluring spaces just at the edges of language, dream and gesture, as they carefully lower, like measuring gauges, into the ineffable: intimations of mortality, the slippery nature of identity, longing, fear ... Harlow is a poet with such a command of music, the dart and turn of movement in language, that he can get away with words that make us squirm in apprentice workshops or bad pop songs – heart, soul – and make them seem newly shone and psychically right. The work is sequined by sound, rather than running its meaning along the rigid rails of metre and end rhyme. The sway and surge of various meanings in the phrasing, and the way sense trails and winds over line breaks: this movement itself often evokes the alternating dark and electric energy of feelings like love, loss and the pain of absence. This is a beautifully honed new collection.

Nouns, verbs, etc.

Poetry; NZ author; Fiona Farrell; Collection

O me voy o te vas / One of us must go

In O me voy o te vas / One of us must go, love is a powerful magnet that attracts and repels in equal measure. In this lyrical collection, Rogelio Guedea (with English translations by Roger Hickin) examines what it means to share one’s life with another person and questions whether – and how – love can survive reality’s steady tap-drip repetitions.

Poeta

Born in 1949, Bluff-based Cilla McQueen is one of New Zealand’s best-loved poets. Poeta: Selected and New Poems brings together a definitive selection of her poetry spanning five decades.

Respirator

Respirator is a sumptuous celebration of David Eggleton’s tenure as the nation’s poet-at-large during his time as Aotearoa NZ Poet Laureate (2019–22). In this collection of probing, kaleidoscopic and richly sensuous poems, Eggleton explores how the social changes and upheavals of the past four extraordinary years manifested in Aotearoa New Zealand, from the impact of living through a pandemic to ecological concerns, technological changes, and shifting viewpoints about identity and global consumerism.

Sinking Lessons

The poems in Sinking Lessons portray the vitality of a world full of things and beings we too often disregard, using language that vibrates in harmony with the lively tales it tells – from small, everyday events to stories of shipwrecks and strandings, resurrections and reanimations, arctic adventures and descents into the underworld.

Strong Words #2

The best of the Landfall essay competition

Taking My Mother to the Opera

Piquant, frank, open, wistful, tender, funny ... this personal memoir by Diane Brown is deftly ‘marbled’ throughout with social history. From carefully chosen anecdotes it slowly unfolds a vivid and compelling sense of character and the psychological dynamics within the family. Many readers will recognise the New Zealand so vividly portrayed here, as Brown marshals deeply personal events and childhood memories in a delightfully astute, understated poetic form.

Tender Machines

In this follow-up collection to the award-winning The Truth Garden , Emma Neale asks where exactly do the personal and the political drop hands? In poems that are engaged, compelling, witty and moving, she looks at how we navigate a true line through the psychological, environmental, social and economic anxieties of our times. The book examines love in its many guises, and also energetically responds to the distractions and delights of the digital age.

The Collected Poems of Katherine Mansfield

This is the first complete edition of Katherine Mansfield’s poetry, including 26 poems, dating from 1909–10, discovered by Gerri Kimber in the Newberry Library in Chicago in 2015. This edition is made up of 217 poems, ordered chronologically, so that the reader can follow Mansfield’s development as a poet and her experiments with different forms, as well as tracing the themes – love and death, the natural world and the seasons, childhood and friendship, music and song – that preoccupied her throughout her writing life. The comprehensive annotations provide illuminating biographical information as well as explaining the rich contexts of the European poetic tradition, including fin-de-siècle decadence within which Mansfield’s artistry is steeped. The inclusion of a collection of newly discovered poems highlights Mansfield’s desire to be taken seriously as a poet from her earliest beginnings as a writer. The poems as a whole point to a poet who varied her craft as she perfected it, often witty and ironic yet always enchanted by the sound of words.

The Conch Trumpet

The Conch Trumpet calls to the scattered tribes of contemporary New Zealand. It sounds the signal to listen close, critically and ‘in alert reverie’. David Eggleton’s reach of references, the marriage of high and low, the grasp of popular and classical allusion, his eye both for cultural trash and epiphanic beauty, make it seem as if here Shakespeare shakes down in the Pacific. In this latest collection David Eggleton is court jester/philosopher/lyricist, and a kind of male Cassandra, roving warningly from primeval swampland to gritty cityscape to the information and disinformation cybercloud.

The Farewell Tourist

Pushing against the boundaries of what poetry might be, Alison Glenny’s The Farewell Tourist is haunting, many-layered and slightly surreal.

The Joy of a Ming Vase

As American critic Tom Disch quipped of many vintage poets: 'friends and pets die, the garden takes on a new significance.' There are poems in this collection about Dutch Masters, the remembered voice of a deceased soprano, a waterfall, ancient Chinese artefacts, victims of the World Wars, kites and flowers; but each piece is sensitively imbued not only with the poet's awareness of impending death but also with the incorrigible fragility of life. While Dallas is at home in a number of different modes, her high regard for literary tradition as a form of spiritual realism makes her eminently readable as a disciplined watcher of the seasons.

The Lifers

From Sean Macgregor’s lounge occupied by stoned youths, to three bank robbers en route to the Penrose ANZ, Michael Steven’s second collection presents his clear, clean vision of ‘the lifers’ who inhabit these islands and beyond. A generation’s subterranean memories of post-Rogernomics New Zealand are a linking thread, in the decades straddling the millennium, while other poems echo with the ghostly voices of the dead, disappeared and forgotten.

The Lives of Coat Hangers

Subtle, witty, linguistically adept and internationally well travelled, Sudesh Mishra is a poet whose range of reference traverses global culture. An ambitious and accomplished writer, one able to brilliantly reinvent language, myth and metaphor, his fifth collection 'The Lives of Coat Hangers' confirms him as a major poetic voice in the South Pacific.

The Moon in a Bowl of Water

Bound together by myth and music, Michael Harlow’s The Moon in a Bowl of Water is a stunning new collection from a poet in complete control of his craft.

The Ones Who Keep Quiet

Exciting new work from a runner-up in the Kathleen Grattan Poetry Award

The Pistils

The Pistils is a dispatch from the cusp of change. It appears at the severing of a 40-year relationship following the illness and death of poet Janet Charman’s partner during the Covid restrictions.

The Sets

The Sets returns again and again to the ever-present sea – as a metaphor, a mirror, a companion and an otherworld that contains our dreams and nightmares. Dunedin poet Victor Billot finds in the South Pacific Ocean an oracle of the future and a keeper of our histories

The Summer King

The Summer King tells stories, exploring the world we inhabit and our relationships with the other. Myth, catastrophe, family, strangers, sex, sport – all feature in this ‘fine and fierce first collection’ (Gillian Clark). The book contains two sequences: ‘Cowarral’, about Preston’s family farm in the Forbes Valley of NSW, and ‘Venery’, which was inspired by the collective nouns that first appeared in the Book of St Albans.

The Truth Garden

This is the fourth book in the series arising from the Kathleen Grattan Award for Poetry. Each book is produced with attention to the traditional qualities of fine book production, in typography, illustration, design, paper and binding. The Truth Garden is illustrated by Kathryn Madill and designed by Fiona Moffat.

The White Clock

A stunning new collection of poetry from one of New Zealand’s most eminent authors

The Wilder Years

David Eggleton, Poet Laureate of Aotearoa 2019–21, has published nine poetry collections, and now, finally, comes a ‘Best Of ’. The Wilder Years: Selected Poems is a hardback compendium of the poet’s own selection from 35 years of published work, together with a handful of new poems.

The Word Went Round

OUT OF PRINT: Powerful historical poems about nineteenth-century Irish emigration to New Zealand, the colonial wars, Von Tempsky and Te Kooti, moving elegies for poet/painter Joanna Margaret Paul, the artist Reiko Kunimatsu and the poet's late father, love poems, and meditations on the nature of spiritual existence in the intellectual pressure-cooker of the twenty-first century. Howard's poems are accompanied by a selection of haunting images by the painter Garry Currin, produced to accompany the long title-poem which is the central feature of the book.

The Yield

The fifth poetry collection from multi-award-winning poet Sue Wootton, the editor of Otago Daily Times Weekend Poem column and author of the novel Strip

This City

This City circles the globe from Florence to Palmerston North but the resulting volume is far more than so-called armchair travel. Topography and public space are a preoccupation (buses and trains, roads and houses, even Google Earth’s Street View all get a mention), but it is her evocation of the transient grounded in these spaces – snippets overheard on an Italian strada, scenes on a bus on Moxham Ave, imaginings of lives from long ago (Jane Austen, Emily Dickenson) – that leaves a taut and exciting impression of lives lived here, in this place, in This City.

This is your real name

The second collection of poetry by Elizabeth Morton

Time of the Icebergs

Much of Time of the Icebergs was written while David Eggleton was a Writer-in-Residence at the Michael King Writers Centre in Auckland in 2009. These are poems about the world we live in, tracing a dystopian present 'hurtling globalisation's highway' where 'Google tells Google that Google saves'. As he says 'I think of it as a collection for browsing and discovering things: soundscapes, seascapes, landscapes, contemporary politics and contemporary people, histories, traditions, and other things besides.'

To the Occupant

To the Occupant by Emma Neale is an innovative and astounding collection from one of New Zealand’s leading poets of her generation.

tumble

This remarkable second collection by award-winning poet Joanna Preston charts a course for the journey from child to woman. Her bold and original voice swoops the reader from the ocean depths to the roof of the world, from nascent saints, Viking raids and fallen angels to talking cameras and an astronaut in space. Always, the human heartbeat is at stake, as Preston explores love, loss, longing and lust – how we stumble, how we soar.

Tung

Tung is the keenly anticipated debut collection from award-winning Ōtepoti-Dunedin poet, Robyn Maree Pickens. Pickens is an eco-pioneer of words, attuned to the fine murmurings of the earth and to the louder sound and content of human languages (English, Spanish, Japanese and Finnish). These poems offer sustenance and repair to a planet in the grips of a socio-ecological crisis.

Two or More Islands

Two or More Islands is the seventh collection of poetry by award-winning New Zealand poet Diana Bridge.

Under Flagstaff

OUT OF PRINT: Cradled between bush-covered hills and sea, the city of Dunedin inspires a strong sense of heritage and place - and fabulous poetry. Under Flagstaff: An Anthology of Dunedin Poetry brings together for the first time a selection from the extraordinarily rich resource of poems, published and unpublished, written about the city and its environs.

Unseasoned Campaigner

Unseasoned Campaigner is a layered collection exploring the complexities of farming life in Horowhenua. Poet Janet Newman uncovers territory ripe for exploration as she juxtaposes the often troubled aspects of commercial farming – the life and death of animals – with loving family relationships.

Walking to Jutland Street

Walking to Jutland Street is the debut poetry collection of Michael Steven, an Auckland poet with strong connections to Dunedin, published by Otago University Press.

When I Reach for Your Pulse

In this electrifying debut, Rushi Vyas untangles slippery personal and political histories in the wake of a parent’s suicide. In this tough and tender, gently powerful collection, grief returns us to elemental silence. This language listens as much as it sings, asking if it is possible to recover from the muting effects of British colonialism, American imperialism, patriarchy and caste hierarchies. Which cultural legacies do we release in order to heal? Which do we keep alive, and which keep us alive?

Whisper of a Crow's Wing

Published simultaneously in Ireland by Salmon Poetry, Majella Cullinane’s remarkable second collection, Whisper of a Crow’s Wing, is the work of a poet with a distinct and powerful voice.

仁 surrender

Innovative new collection from award-winning New Zealand poet Janet Charman