Far Flung by Rhian Gallagher

$25.00 NZD

Category: Poetry

Far-Flung traverses multiple terrains - home and upheaval, our connection to the environment and to people, our relation to the past, place and placelessness. From 'the Kilmog slumping seaward' to 'the bracts and the berries and the leaves' of the Mackenzie country; the moth ('courier of bloom powder') ; the wind that grows like an animal and 'the great loneliness / of grass' - Gallagher is in conversation with the natural world. Her lyric poems, marked by attentiveness, have an earthy, intuitive music and a linguistic clarity. Gallagher moves easily from the ecological and personal concerns of contemporary life to the nineteenth-century Irish migrants and the historic legacy of the Seacliff Lunatic Asylum. The multi-voiced, dramatic sequence 'Seacliff Epistles' draws on a rich variety of poetic forms: from lyric to prose poem, parable to riddle, monologue and letter poem. Bill Manhire called Rhian Gallagher's poetry 'one of the quiet, astonishing secrets of New Zealand writing'. Far-Flung sees the poet's lyric exploration broaden considerably in an assured new work. ...Show more

Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass by Lana Del Rey

$45.00 NZD

Category: Poetry

THE HIGHLY ANTICIPATED DEBUT BOOK OF POETRY FROM LANA DEL REY. "Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass is the title poem of the book and the first poem I wrote of many. Some of which came to me in their entirety, which I dictated and then typed out, and some that I worked laboriously picking apart each w ord to make the perfect poem. They are eclectic and honest and not trying to be anything other than what they are and for that reason I'm proud of them, especially because the spirit in which they were written was very authentic." -- Lana Del Rey   Lana's breathtaking first book solidifies her further as "the essential writer of her times" (The Atlantic). The collection features more than thirty poems, many exclusive to the book: Never to Heaven, The Land of 1,000 Fires, Past the Bushes Cypress Thriving, LA Who Am I to Love You?, Tessa DiPietro, Happy, Paradise Is Very Fragile, Bare Feet on Linoleum, and many more. This beautiful hardcover edition showcases Lana's typewritten manuscript pages alongside her original photography. The result is an extraordinary poetic landscape that reflects the unguarded spirit of its creator.   ...Show more

Dearly: Poems by Margaret Atwood

$34.00 NZD

Category: Poetry

The collection of a lifetime from the bestselling novelist and poet. By turns moving, playful and wise, the poems gathered in Dearly are about absences and endings, ageing and retrospection, but also about gifts and renewals. They explore bodies and minds in transition, as well as the everyday objects and rituals that embed us in the present. Werewolves, sirens and dreams make their appearance, as do various forms of animal life and fragments of our damaged environment. Before she became one of the world's most important and loved novelists, Atwood was a poet. Dearly is her first collection in over a decade. It brings together many of her most recognizable and celebrated themes, but distilled - from minutely perfect descriptions of the natural world to startlingly witty encounters with aliens, from pressing political issues to myth and legend. It is a pure Atwood delight, and long-term readers and new fans alike will treasure its insight, empathy and humour. ...Show more

Sleepwalking In Antarctica and Other Poems by Owen Marshall

$5.00 NZD

Category: Poetry

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 countrysi de, 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. ...Show more

Chosen by Geoff Cochrane

$20.00 NZD

Category: Poetry

‘Each and every day, at some point on our walk, he stops and lets me know that this is today's person, the party he wants to be introduced to.' The nineteenth collection of poems by cult Wellington poet and pedestrian Geoff Cochrane. Geoff Cochrane is the author of eighteen collections of poetry, two no vels, and Astonished Dice: Collected Short Stories (2014). In 2009 he was awarded the Janet Frame Prize for Poetry, in 2010 the inaugural Nigel Cox Unity Books Award, and in 2014 an Arts Foundation of New Zealand Laureate Award. ...Show more

The Savage Coloniser Book by Tusiata Avia

$25.00 NZD

Category: Poetry

Kneel like a prayer full of lynching This is my God-given white ‘Savage is as savage does. And we’re all implicated. Avia breaks the colonial lens wide open. We peer through its poetic shards and see a savage world – outside, inside. With characteristic savage and stylish wit, Avia holds the word-blad e to our necks and presses with a relentless grace. At the end, you’ll feel your pulse anew.’ —Selina Tusitala Marsh, New Zealand Poet Laureate 2017–19  The voices of Tusiata Avia are infinite. She ranges from vulnerable to forbidding to celebratory with forms including pantoums, prayers and invocations. And in this electrifying new work, she gathers all the power of her voice to speak directly into histories of violence. Avia addresses James Cook in fury. She unravels the 2019 Christchurch massacre, walking us back to the beginning. She describes the contortions we make to avoid blame. And she locates the many voices that offer hope. The Savage Coloniser Book is a personal and political reckoning. As it holds history accountable, it rises in power.  'A welcome autopsy of colonisers in past and present times, penned with a scalpel's precision, the inspection of parts, minced down to the floor. Sit in your blood-splattered apron and feel as the verdict is read.' —Ali Cobby Eckermann ‘Tusiata Avia’s poetry . . . is a full-body plunge in winter seas. It’s breathtaking, skin tingling and teeth rattling. I feel alive. It’s as real to me as a salt-crested wave smashing me full in the face until I am nothing but that moment . . . Exhilaration, pain, vulnerability, joy, cheeky confidence and acknowledgement. But what I don’t feel is lonely.’ —Nafanua Kersel, The Hook ...Show more

The Fire of Joy: Roughly 80 Poems to Get by Heart and Say Aloud by Clive James (Editor)

$40.00 NZD

Category: Poetry

Essentially, this is Clive James' desert island poems: a selection of his favourite verse and a personal commentary on each.The Fire of Joy was the final book Clive James completed before his death in 2019. It takes its title from the French expression Feu de Joie, which refers to a military celebration when all the riflemen of a regiment fire one shot after another in a wave of continuous sound: it is a reminder that the regiment’s collective power relies on the individual, and vice versa.In this book, James has chosen a succession of English poems, exploding in sequence from Chaucer to the present day; they tell the story of someone writing something wonderful, and someone else coming along, reading it, and feeling impelled to write something even more wonderful. After a lifetime, these are the poems James found so good that he remembered them despite himself. In offering them to you, the main purpose of this book is to provide ammunition that will satisfy your urge to discover, learn and declaim verse.As well as his selection of poems, James offers a commentary on each: whether this is a biographical, historical or critical introduction to the poem, or a more personal anecdote about the role a particular poem has played in James’s life, these mini essays provide the joy of James’s enthusiasm and the benefit of his knowledge. Full of the flashing fires of poems you will not be able to forget, this book will ignite your passion and leave you with a contagious crackle rattling in your ears. ...Show more

Ariel (collection of poems) by Sylvia Plath

$30.00 NZD

Category: Poetry | Series: Faber Poetry Ser.

The poems in Sylvia Plath's Ariel, including many of her best-known such as 'Lady Lazarus', 'Daddy', 'Edge' and 'Paralytic', were all written between the publication in 1960 of Plath's first book, The Colossus, and her death in 1963. 'If the poems are despairing, vengeful and destructive, they are at t he same time tender, open to things, and also unusually clever, sardonic, hardminded . . . They are works of great artistic purity and, despite all the nihilism, great generosity . . . the book is a major literary event.' A. Alvarez in the Observer This beautifully designed edition forms part of a series with five other cherished poets, including Wendy Cope, Don Paterson, Philip Larkin, Simon Armitage and Alice Oswald. ...Show more

A Vase And a Vast Sea by Jenny Nimon (Ed)

$28.00 NZD

Category: Poetry

In A Vase and a Vast Sea, poetry and prose rustle against the window, scatter palm fronds across the road and sneak off to the movies on a Tuesday. There are moments of nostalgia blended with dangerous undercurrents and domestic life. Edited by Jenny Nimon, this collection is a reunion of writers such a s Renée, Maggie Rainey-Smith, Barbara Else, Rata Gordon, Tim Jones and Adrienne Jansen, and is an essential keepsake of New Zealand literature and a much-loved writing course. ‘This collection is banging a drum. It’s softness. It’s relationships and eyerolls, bodies and beaches, classicism and the future and the visceral immediate. It quivers with life – a fitting memorial slab to a vibrant, unpredictable and inventive creative writing programme.’ – Jane Arthur ...Show more

Wow by Bill Manhire

$25.00 NZD

Category: Poetry

Excuse me if I laugh. The roads are dark and large books block our path. The air we breathe is made of evening air. The world is longer than the road that brings us here. Bill Manhire's new book begins with the song of an extinct bird, the huia, and journeys on into troubling futures. These poems reach for the possibilities of lyric, even as their worlds are being threatened in a range of agitating ways. In the title poem we hear a baby say Wow to life and to the astonishing prospect of language; but almost immediately we hear the world reply: Also. Along the way there are several desperate jokes.   ...Show more

Goddess Muscle by Karlo Mila

$35.00 NZD

Category: Poetry

This long-awaited poetry collection from award-winning Pasifika poet Karlo Mila spans work written over a decade. The poems are both personal and political. They trace the effect of defining issues such as racism, poverty, violence, climate change and power on Pasifika peoples, Aotearoa and beyond. The y also focus on the internal and micro issues – the ending of a marriage, the hope of new relationships, and the daily politics of being a partner, woman and mother. The collection meditates on love and relationships and explores identity, culture, community and belonging with a voice that does not shy away from the difficult. ...Show more

Magnolia 木蘭 (NZ edition) by Nina Mingya Powles

$30.00 NZD

Category: Poetry