Small Holes in the Silence: Collected Works by Hone Tuwhare

$25.00 NZD

Category: New Zealand Poetry | Reading Level: very good

'A poem is a ripple of words on water wind-huffed'. Hone Tuwhare, one of this country's best-loved poets, died in 2008. He was New Zealand's second Te Mata Poet Laureate and in 2003 was among ten of New Zealand's greatest living artists named as Arts Foundation of NZ Icon Artists. His rhythmic voice ran ged from playful, earthy, wry and cheeky to protesting and angry, to loving and elegiac. Delighting in the everyday, he had an acute eye for detail and a deep love of the land. He evoked Maori myth and waiata, but also embraced the wider world. And throughout, his poems circled around friendship, loss and love. Bringing together a wide variety of approaches - haikus, lyrics, laments, conversations, narratives, traditional form and modern, English and Maori - this volume showcases the finest examples of Hone's poetry, from his early triumph in No Ordinary Sun (one of the most widely read and reprinted collections of poems in New Zealand), through his years as a political activist, husband and father, right up to his final works, published when he was in his 80s. Also included are a handful of previously unpublished works as well as new translations into Maori of a number of poems written by Pat Hohepa, Waihoroi Shortland and Selwyn Muru. ...Show more

The Joy of a Ming Vase by Ruth Dallas

$15.00 NZD

Category: New Zealand Poetry | Reading Level: very good

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 incorrigi ble 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. ...Show more

What to Call Your Child by Bill Manhire

$30.00 NZD

Category: New Zealand Poetry | Series: Te Mata Estate Poet Laureate Ser. | Reading Level: very good

This collection of poetry results from Bill Manhire's term as New Zealand's Poet Laureate. It includes work from his visit to Antarctica as part of the Artists in Antarctica programme, along with a range of new writing on various subjects.

R. A. K. Mason: Uncollected Poems by R.A.K. Mason (edited by Roger Hickin)

$38.00 NZD

Category: New Zealand Poetry | Reading Level: new

Allen Curnow called R. A. K. Mason (190571) New Zealand's 'first wholly original, unmistakably gifted poet'. His Collected Poems, first published in 1962, was arigorous selection made before Mason's 'late flowering' of 196265. Some of the excluded poems and some of the late poems have since seen the lig ht of day in twobiographies, but many are published here for the first time, drawn mostly from the papers of the Mason archive at the Hocken Collections, University of Otago, in Dunedin. ...Show more

Glass Wings by Fleur Adcock

$14.00 NZD

Category: New Zealand Poetry | Reading Level: very good

Fleur Adcock's title refers to the transparent, glittering wings of some of the species - bees, mosquitoes, dragonflies - celebrated or lamented in a sequence of poems on encounters with arthropods, from the stick insects and crayfish of her native New Zealand to the clothes' moths that infest her Londo n house. There is an elegy for the once abundant caterpillars of her English childhood, while other sections of the book include elegies for human beings and poems based on family wills from the 16th to the 20th centuries, as well as birthday greetings for old friends and for a new great-grandson. ...Show more

Dragon Talk by Fleur Adcock

$14.00 NZD

Category: New Zealand Poetry | Reading Level: very good

After the appearance of Fleur Adcock's Poems 1960-2000 she wrote no more poems for several years. This cessation coincided with - but was not entirely caused by - her giving up smoking. When poetry returned to her in 2003 it tended towards a sparer, more concentrated style. This new collection continues to reflect her preoccupations with family matters and with her ambivalent feelings about her native New Zealand. Her initial inspiration was the letters her father wrote home from England to his parents during World War II, which evoked her own memories of that era. The central sequence moves from her first coming to consciousness in New Zealand up to and through the war years in Britain and on to sketches from her teens in puritanical postwar Wellington after her reluctant return - not without her usual sardonic eye for incongruities and absurdities. There are also affectionate poems for her grandchildren and her late mother. ...Show more

Gallipoli & Other Poems by Alistair Te Ariki Campbell

$12.00 NZD

Category: New Zealand Poetry | Reading Level: very good

This varied collection comprises two poetic sequences on themes of war, love and peace, and shows Campbell's lyricism at its best: mature, felxible and seemingly effortless.

Poeta: Selected and New Poetry by Cilla McQueen

$20.00 NZD

Category: New Zealand Poetry | Reading Level: near fine

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, arranged by the poet in a thematic narrative that elucidates abiding themes while maintaining a loose chronology of her creative life to date. Of mixed Scottish and English heritage, McQueen is a translocated Hebridean, a spokesperson variously for the southern islands and coast, Rakiura, Fiordland, Murihiku and Dunedin. One of a few indispensable poetic voices of the south, she has long been part of a social matrix of artists, among them Hone Tuwhare, Ralph Hotere and Marilynn Webb, dedicated to bringing out the native brogue and colours of Southland-Otago. Poeta gathers together poems from the poet's 14 previous volumes, punctuated by 11 striking drawings, and also includes a range of new work that shows her riddling creativity continuing to grow and evolve. Collectively, the poems demonstrate a versatile and diligent wordsmith never content to sit on her laurels, ever experimenting and improving in her attempt to write the world's poem. ...Show more

Fully Clothed and So Forgetful by Hannah Mettner

$15.00 NZD

Category: New Zealand Poetry | Reading Level: very good

A Winner in Ockhams New Zealand Book Awards - Best First Book Award for Poetry 2018 Fully Clothed and So Forgetful is an intimate, intelligent first book by Hannah Mettner. Moving through love, motherhood, sexuality, family and anxiety, these poems infuse universal themes with wit and sudden, even shock ing beauty. ...Show more

Uncle & Others by Barry Mitcalfe

$15.00 NZD

Category: New Zealand Poetry | Reading Level: very good

The Blind Mountain and Other Poems by Kendrick Smithyman

$30.00 NZD

Category: New Zealand Poetry | Reading Level: good

Her Limitless Her by Reihana Robinson

$15.00 NZD

Category: New Zealand Poetry | Reading Level: very good

The bounty of women, how far they’ll go, how far they can stretch – to love, to encompass, to bear. Find them here: bosom-packed, dreamy, dragging their offspring, twinsets askew, peeling, darning, preening. In Her Limitless Her Reihana Robinson has created a beguiling space for her to stret ch on the page, and for joy to dance and grief to spin. ...Show more