Happiness: the mid-point, perhaps, between contentment and joy. We all hope for it, but we all also have times when it seems far away. Sometimes, we even fail to notice when it’s there. These poems don’t celebrate rapture or feverish delight. Mostly they capture moments of what Emily Dickinson calls “casual simplicity” – giggling irreverently during a yoga class or seeing a dragonfly land on a lake. Happiness, they seem to say, is far less complicated than we sometimes imagine: “It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing a sock, to the pusher, to the basketmaker, and to the clerk stacking cans of carrots in the night.” from ‘Happiness’ by Jane Kenyon. Deborah Alma is a poet and poetry tutor, also known as the Emergency Poet offering the world’s first mobile poetry first aid service. Her delightful and thoughtful selection is sure to lift the spirits and gladden the heart. Poems by Deborah Alma, Meg Cox, Emily Dickinson, Jonathan Davidson, Tony Hoagland, Jane Kenyon, Bryony Littlefair, Naomi Shihab Nye, RS Thomas and James Wright.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 20

Dimensions: 137 x 210 mm

Publication Date: 01-07-2019

Koe invites readers to explore human connections with nature through a selection of over 100 poems composed in Aotearoa New Zealand from pre-European times to the present day. Including a substantial introduction and editors’ notes, Koe is the first anthology to provide a comprehensive overview of ecopoetic traditions in Aotearoa and to locate these traditions as part of the global ecopoetry scene. In Koe, editors Janet Newman and Robert Sullivan reveal the genesis, development and heritage of a unique Aotearoa New Zealand ecopoetry derived from both traditional Māori poetry and the English poetry canon. Organised chronologically into three sections—representing the early years (poets born in or before the nineteenth century), the middle years of the twentieth century, and the twenty-first-century ‘now’—each segment presents a diverse array of voices. Across all these time frames, speaking from the conditions of their era, the poets delve into themes of humility, reverence and interconnectedness with the nonhuman world. They challenge traditional Eurocentric perspectives, highlight the significance of indigenous narratives, and wrestle with the impacts of European colonisation. With more than 100 poems of celebration, elegy, apprehension, hope and activism, Koe gives us the history that holds our future.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 315

Dimensions: 170 x 220 mm

Publication Date: 22-08-2024

‘The scope and invention of these poems is simply dazzling.’ – Anne Kennedy 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. Respirator stands as a powerful artistic record of an unprecedented historical moment. "Australia’s heat map in January glowed every which way, red, purple, black, and our skies were made yellow by trans-Tasman smoke, while scarcely less fraught were dog days of February, as arrivals drifted through airport duty-free, in a haze of competing perfume spritzes, and reports came of a strange virus out of Wuhan, pale horse and pale rider." — ‘Rāhui: Lockdown Journal'

Bind: hardback

Pages: 192

Dimensions: 170 x 220 mm

Publication Date: 20-03-2023

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. Harlow is the maestro of the prose poem. Here he presents a collection of small human journeys, with a strong emphasis on narrative. The work is consciously rooted in Greek mythology and in the idea of storytelling as a continuous river, flowing from the ancients to the present, telling one story on the surface, but carrying in its depths the glints of ancient archetypes, symbols and myths. Each poem is studded with associations that hark back millennia. Harlow delights in the airiness of the imagination and the magic of transformation, especially through the power of language. Words become `thought-birds' that can be caged, coaxed to sing, or allowed to fly, and the poems' sonic after-effects echo and re-echo in the reader's mind and ear.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 80

Dimensions: 165 x 235 mm

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.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 100

Dimensions: 150 x 235 mm

Publication Date: 22-08-2016

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… A poem is a vote. It chooses freedom of imagination, freedom of critical thought, freedom of speech. A collection of political poems in its very essence argues for the power of the democratic voice. Here New Zealand poets from diverse cultures, young and old, new and seasoned, from the Bay of Islands to Bluff, rally for justice on everything from a degraded environment to systemically embedded poverty; from the long, painful legacy of colonialism to explosive issues of sexual consent. Communally these writers show that political poems can be the most vivid and eloquent calls for empathy, for action and revolution, even for a simple calling to account. American poet Mark Leidner tweeted in mid-2016 that ‘A vote is a prayer with no poetry’. Here, then, are 101 secular prayers to take to the ballot box in an election year. But we think this book will continue to express the nation’s hopes every political cycle: the hope for equality and justice. Two small but potent words. 101 potent poems. Stand up, write back!

Bind: hardback

Pages: 184

Dimensions: 150 x 230 mm

Publication Date: 17-04-2017

In Sudesh Mishra’s new collection the opening poem, ‘The Capacious Muse’, acts as a manifesto or declaration of intent. It’s a sequence of aphoristic sentences that begins: ‘The muse will not proscribe.’ In other words, this poet will not rule anything out as the fit subject for a poem. Sudesh Mishra is a philosophical poet, one preoccupied not only with how meaning is made, but with how meaning is manifested in the modern world. His poetry is rich in the truths revealed by humble, humdrum objects, as in the title poem, ‘The Lives of Coat Hangers’: They wait for a latch to raise an eyebrow, For a shadow to step in from the light. They long to be held in the arms of a coat … 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 confirms him as a major poetic voice in the South Pacific. … a poet with imagination to burn – Murray Bramwell, Adelaide Review Mishra’s development as a poet shows in the restrained, formal, technical brilliance of the poems –Briar Wood, The Contemporary Pacific

Bind: paperback

Pages: 144

Dimensions: 150 x 235 mm

Publication Date: 29-01-2016

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: In the large lead shoe X-ray machine at the back of the shoe shop, our skeletal feet appeared at the press of a button. We irradiated ourselves further when the shop assistant wasn’t looking. … I tried the magic trick of pulling the tablecloth out from under our plates of tomato soup. This didn’t work. 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.

Bind: hardback

Pages: 134

Dimensions: 165 x 235 mm

Publication Date: 13-05-2016

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 ‘cool’ poet, a temperament that seems reserved, controlled, decent, funny and intelligent; a craftsman not a showman, with a fine musical ear, whose work is dependable and of the highest order. And as well as witty and clever work, there are poems that catch moments of deep feeling; and equally of exhilaration, such as the ten-year-old Alan standing up on the seat, his head through the sunroof of his father’s car that is cruising downhill, ‘pushing 40’ with the engine off to save petrol, ‘drunk with the scent of heather and whin / that airy silence …’ Alan Roddick is writing as well as any New Zealand poet currently at work on the scene. It is wonderful to have him back – something to celebrate!

Bind: paperback

Pages: 100

Dimensions: 150 x 230 mm

Publication Date: 20-09-2016

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 …

Bind: paperback

Pages: 64

Dimensions: 150 x 220 mm

Publication Date: 03-07-2015