Pushing against the boundaries of what poetry might be, Alison Glenny’s The Farewell Tourist is haunting, many-layered and slightly surreal. In The Magnetic Process sequence a man and a woman inhabit a polar world, adrift in zones of divergence, where dreams are filled with snow, icebergs, and sinking ships. Their scientific instruments and observations measure a fragmented and uncertain space where conventional perspectives are violated. In a series of histories – of the Atmosphere, of the Honeymoon – footnotes reference vanished texts. By turns mysterious, ominous and evocative, they represent connections to an obscured narrative of disintegration and icy melancholy.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 80

Dimensions: 150 x 230 x 6 mm

Publication Date: 20-08-2018

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. There are dazzling compressions of history; astonishing paens to harbours, mountains, lakes and rivers; wrenchingly dark, satirical critiques of contemporary politics, of solipsism, narcissism, the apolitical, the corporate, with a teeming vocabulary to match. And often too a sense of the imperative, grounding reality of the phenomenal world – the thisness of things: Cloud whispers brush daylight’s ear; fern question-marks form a bush encore; forlorn heat swings cobbed in webs. – from ‘Nor-wester Flying’ 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

Bind: paperback

Pages: 124

Dimensions: 170 x 225 mm

Publication Date: 20-02-2015

"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.
Any empathetic parent knows the fears and anxieties of sending a young child into the world of other children, their casual cruelties and dreamy naivety. Each concern in exponentially increased when a child's educational and emotional needs set them apart.
Cloudboy writes his own version of Genesis, he invents a new language; he sketces intricate maps; he reads Aristotle and develops an obsession with Dr Who; he interrupts; he sways; his 'fists come clenched and swinging'. To onlookers, Cloudboy seems troubled, trouble.
Cirrus, cumulus, arcus, stratus: cloud forms speak to Harvey of the phrases of the mother-child bond; the mood-swings and leaps of her child's mind; the mutability of personality; the attraction and evaporation of human kindness; presence and absence; reverie and forgetfulness; the intensity and yet bittersweet transience of early childhood.
With a limber, gorgeously metamorphic sense of sculptural and sonic aspects of poetic form, this book is a tender and detailed atlas of a child's imaginative potential. Yet one of the most remarkable gifts it reveals for us readers is Cloudmother's own finely calibrated perceptions.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 80

Dimensions: 148 x 210 mm

Publication Date: 28-04-2014

Using the extraordinary capacity of music to revive the places and people from our pasts, this poetic memoir springs from over 50 song titles of song lines and spans more than four decades.
Laconic, wry, subtly philosophical, Kay McKenzie Cooke's new collection carries us from her rural Southland girlhood in the 1950s and 60s to the bitter pressures of adopting out her baby as a teenager in the 1970s, and to her present as grandmother, mother, wife and author.
A plain-spoken honesty, a sensitivity tot he natural world, a gentle humour, a deep sense of how the richness of our relationships lodges in ordinary rituals and routines: all combine in a quietly moving autobiography.
"Born to a Red-Headed Woman" is documentary, vivid, ever grounded in the workaday detail of farming, the changing decades, family, city life and job. Yet at times the language peels right back to the tender nerve of major, formative losses.
If Cooke's observations of the daily are the simple melodic lines that seem to coast on the surface, beneath that runs a rich bass line of meditation on time, on meaning, how to live a life true to oneself, and to familial love.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 72

Dimensions: 148 x 210 mm

Publication Date: 28-04-2014

In the afternoon, peasant women set up shop beside their street-side fish smokers. Look, she said, from here you can see where the mountain range begins... And I wondered: what's the use being a tourist in a place like this? It's like bathing in clothes, kissing a lover through a handkerchief. - from "Lake Baikal" 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. From playful, rhythmical poems about the art of dinner conversation, to warm glimpses of intimacy, she lays poetry's table with the knife of light satire, the bright salt of wit, the heady wine of love, the bread of knowledge. This quietly poised, confident first collection has a musical, emotional and thematic range of a substantial new talent.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 64

Dimensions: 150 x 230 mm

Publication Date: 21-03-2016

what did you eat willful Chang’e? – fly to the moon where no one hears you rabbiting on you won’t silence me by chopping the tree its white leaves and a night-dipped pen the fuel of my longevity As one of eight writers, poet Janet Charman was invited in 2009 to take part in a hectic, immersive literary residency in Hong Kong. Written out of this time of stimulating buzz, 仁 surrender chronicles the tensions, translations and literary crushes that ensue, with ever-present comedy. From this intense hothouse and these privileged constraints flow narrative poems that capture the creative and cultural dislocation of travel, with its petty irritants and constant surprises. Charman’s verse has always been distinguished by a combination of astute observation, compassion, pluck, vulnerability and willingness to poke fun at herself. – Iain Sharp In her laconic and original style, Janet Charman writes a body of work which sees [her] exploiting the motif of journeying to investigate the colonised land, past and present. – Siobhan Harvey

Bind: paperback

Pages: 118

Dimensions: 150 x 230 mm

Publication Date: 01-11-2017

Walking to Jutland Street is the impressive first book-length collection by up-and-coming Auckland-based poet Michael Steven. The title refers to Dunedin’s industrial wharf precinct where some of the poet’s friends shared a flat in 2010. A poem about friendship in the face of the other, ‘Walking to Jutland Street’ vividly recreates their evening ‘constitutional’ from the flat via the bridge over train tracks to the city and back, with its inebriated, surreal, sometimes nightmarish inhabitants. Other poems deliver snapshots of the human condition through bizarre personalities such as the subject of ‘Dropped Pin: Jollie Street’, ‘a man who proclaimed to function / best in a state close to coma’. Still others are tender love poems, travel poems (in 2016 the poet slept in the last bedroom of explorer Vasco da Gama), poems about family or childhood memory. A poet of gritty, day-to-day urban New Zealand reality (whether depicting teenage drug dealing, alcoholics or the night shelter), Steven is equally a writer steeped in literary tradition, Buddhist mysticism and world-historical narrative. His is a voice that aspires to capture quotidian experience or personality as a phenomenon implicitly of all times and places. In this pursuit, his literary cousins are Olds, Orr, Mitchell, Dickson, Johnson and Baxter.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 80

Dimensions: 150 x 230 mm

Publication Date: 20-03-2018

This fine new collection of poetry, Owen Marshall's second, is rich in the themes and preoccupations that have made his short stories and novels so admired. Here are wise, elegiac poems on love and loss, longing and regret, and ageing; beautifully observed, affectionate poems about New Zealand countryside, where 'clear cold barking comes from miles away' ; sly and sharply witty poems about human frailty - 'Death's an old joke, the Russian said / but comes to each of us as a surprise' ; poems that look back to a distant past whose inhabitants were 'much the same as you and me' - all expressed in language that is superbly balanced and finely judged.

Pages: 144

Dimensions: 148 x 210 mm

Publication Date: 01-04-2010

LORNA STAVELEY ANKER was born in 1914. She used to joke that this was the cause of the First World War. In truth, the poems in this fine collection reveal her as New Zealand’s first woman war poet. There are poems here that arise from her childhood memories of Kaiser Bill. Three of her uncles died in France.
She was a ‘war widow’ in the Second World War, one of the civilian casualties who make up what is known as ‘the unsung generation’.
This collection contains the best of her published poems and a substantial number never seen before. Edited with loving care by Canterbury poet Bernadette Hall, this is a book that will open your eyes to our nation’s invisible history, the story of a seemingly ordinary life that proves to be extraordinary in the telling.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 96

Dimensions: 148 x 210 mm

Publication Date: 20-04-2013

Mary Cresswell is at her imaginative best in this new collection, built from her experiments with the ghazal, a traditional form, which she first met via the work of Agha Shahid Ali and Mimi Khalvati. The poems in ‘Fish Stories’ are presented as an intellectual challenge to students of the ghazal and glosa forms, encouraging them to develop their own craft. At the same time, Cresswell’s poetry is widely accessible and appealing: using rhyme and varying poetic structures, inspired by a range of topics, but especially by nature and ecology, she combines humour with serious comment to engage and connect with her reader.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 132

Dimensions: 140 x 200 mm

Publication Date: 20-05-2015