Diana Bridge’s subjects are reflected through a range of cultural lenses. To engagement with Western and New Zealand literature should be added her immersion in the great Asian cultures of China and India. Her poetry is an intricate meshing of realities and possesses a remarkable depth and richness of perspective. These are poised, elegantly wrought poems, full of lively intelligence and verbal deftness. Since Baxter, most New Zealand poets have shied away from the use of myth in their poetry. In this collection, Bridge mines this vein for its deeply traditional and personal resonances. She knows, as firmly as did Jung, that ‘myths give us pictures for our emotions’. Here, the poems that openly glance off myth are brief, fresh takes that centre on the heroines of Western Classical legend. They begin in an irony that is needed to cope with the sometimes shocking stories, then range through time to alight with radical brevity on Shakespeare and English history. The refrain of the past narrows down to the notion of the family, No one of us today is of the House of Atreus – Just meet the Family, I say. The book concludes with ‘The Way a Stone Falls’, 22 poems set in Southeast Asia. The sequence takes on board the Cambodian tragedy of last century by way of headless statues – taking a sideswipe at French colonialism. It confronts the hardest decision in the whole Hindu tradition, that of Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita. This is how Bridge finds her way in the world – a place of trees and people and noise and contingency – with the assurance that myth tells her story as well as its own.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 80

Publication Date: 01-06-2019

Deep Colour, by acclaimed poet Diana Bridge, is a fiercely sensory and meticulously crafted collection. These poems respond with graceful precision to the immediate physical world, and meditate on time, beauty and the nature of being. Whether remembering a friend, describing a child’s first steps, or observing her surroundings – a tree, a painting, the flashing fin of a goldfish, a simple everyday object like a lamp or a bowl – Bridge is finely attuned to the here-and-now. ‘While it lived,’ she writes, ‘it was intensity itself.’ These prismatic poems, which include some exquisite translations of poems by the fifth-century Chinese poet Xie Tiao, are fully immersed in the world, vividly alive to the dance of light and shadow, movement and stillness, sound and silence. Few poets see so clearly or write so luminously. Bridge’s poems return us to the daily round with our senses heightened, our minds alert and our hearts made tender.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 84

Dimensions: 150 x 230 mm

Publication Date: 20-04-2023