In Anna Jackson's fifth collection of poetry, a rich and leafy life closes in on the New Zealand poet. Scenarios from home and work join fairy-tale tropes in these multifaceted poems that preoccupy themselves with thickets of language and other tangles and examine the relationship between "I" and "you." Venturing into the realm of academia, the zoo, and a pool hall, this compilation also visits the sites of folktales, stories, and dreams. With surprising...

The Drummer is Ian Wedde's eighth collection and it is plump with exquisite visual images, lost faith in language, revelations of intense beauty and literary allusions (from the Romantics to the New Zealand tradition). This is what the author writes about his collection: 'The word 'transport' seems to me to describe an event anywhere between a bus-trip and a vision. The dogged example of Odysseus in one margin, the raptures of language in another....

A well-loved New Zealand poet returns to territory that will be familiar to all readers in this collection of verse that takes on the uncelebrated, even mundane aspects of everyday life: family, work, suburbia. The book is divided into three sections. The first deals with a midlife career change; the second looks back to a period earlier in the poet's life, when she was a receptionist for a television company; and the third is a more intimate, bittersweet...

The poems in All Cretans are Liars are written for friends, lovers, for a small son, for explaining solitude or betrayal - they start out this way but soon take on their own life and walk out to meet us. Anne French sees her poems as small fictions, where intense personal experiences are crafted into elegant and ironic artefacts. This voice is warm, honest and sophisticated. All Cretans are Liars is an accomplished first collection by a poet who became...

The poems that make up Castaly: Poems 1973-77 have been selected by the poet from work completed over the course of four years. Ian Wedde writes: The poems in this book represent my attempts to remain alert in the world between 1973 and 1977. . . . Nevertheless my main obsessions (sometimes called 'themes') have remained the same, though not habitual I hope. They are few, and if they don't come across in these poems, well, I did the best I could....

"Leggott continues to write complex lyrics, sampling thought and song, voice and vision." Charles Bernstein, Notable Books "There is a flow in Leggott's writing that reminds me of reading Shelley: the same feeling of being swept up into the sky and returned again, with the sense of the present altered and set in proportion." - Elizabeth Smither, Dominion Post Young Knowledge: The Poems of Robin Hyde. A Dominion Post's Book of the Week selection (Elizabeth...

An accomplished collection of poems, A Pattern of Marching brings us messages of cool precision and accuracy from Elizabeth Smither. Restrained elegance, fine craft and wit characterise the verses. This is, in the words of the last line of the title poem, 'A skilled performance anyone could share'.--Provided by the publisher.

A collection of poems by one of New Zealand's major poets, Spells for Coming Out exhibits a unity derived from mood and circumstance. Memories of Europe, regrets at the absence of 'friends, fugitives and lovers', dominate the opening section, and recur later when the physical scene before the poet is Mount Cargill and Otago Harbour. The feeling is lyrical, the structure informal, the clues are there to be followed into layers of resonance and meaning.--Provided...

Described as the 'sly old fox of New Zealand verse', Kendrick Smithyman is a major New Zealand poet. In Selected Poems passionate commitment to the craft of language and to a sense of place stamp the 100 poems selected by Peter Simpson. Thick with wry wit, unexpected imagery and astonishing fluency, Selected Poems demonstrates Kendrick Smithyman's skill and achievement.--Provided by the publisher.

Portraying a parent's experience of coming to terms with the new and frightening world of mental health care, this narrative explores the myriad foreign ways of diagnosis and treatment. Written from a mother's perspective, the poetic sequence displays the anguish and complexity of dealing with mental illness, describing the events of an ordinary family--the numerous visits to doctors, the treatments that don't work, and the people who suddenly have...