Are Friends Electric? by Helen Heath

$25.00 NZD

Category: NZ Poetry

Are Friends Electric? offers a vivid and moving vision of a past, present and future mediated by technology. The first part of Helen Heath's bold new collection is comprised largely of found poems which emerge from conversations about sex bots, people who feel an intimate love for bridges, fences and b uildings, a meditation on Theo Jansens beautifully strange animal sculptures, and the lives of birds in cities. A series of speculative poems further explores questions of how we incorporate technology into our lives and bodies. In these poems on grief, Heath asks how technology can keep us close with those we have lost. How might our experiences of grieving and remembering be altered? ...Show more

How To Be Old by Rachel McAlpine

$25.00 NZD

Category: NZ Poetry

Wellington writer Rachel McAlpine blogs and podcasts about living and ageing and is celebrating her 80th birthday with a book of poems. How to Be Old is an explosion of humanity on the page with some practical tips from the author and sage advice from Elsie aged five. Rachel has also written novels, son gs and plays, and books about writing. Her website is writeintolife.com ...Show more

Tuning Wordsworth's Piano by Jane Simpson

$30.00 NZD

Category: NZ Poetry

On an unlikely pilgrimage, a cycling tour to find a poet's unmarked crib, Jane Simpson discovers a landscape at once less Romantic, and more lyrical than the 'unspoilt Nature' seen by tourists at scenic spots. Unexpected turns draw the reader into the worlds of goddess religions, pre-contact Maori soci ety and western Christianity; and into the intimate world of family relationships. In the final section, where the sun and stars sing at the marriage of gay people in the Church, Wordsworth's Piano is tuned to the harmony of the spheres.   Tuning Wordsworth's piano Unspoilt Nature is nature writ too small; nature at our feet; nodding daffodils saying ‘Yes’, green the obverse of grey paths in the Victorian Botanical Gardens where children cavort and disks wheel, Orphic artists paint concentric circles, create the sun – sing the music of the spheres. ...Show more

Lay Studies by Steven Toussaint

$25.00 NZD

Category: Poetry

In Lay Studies, Steven Toussaint conducts an impressive range of lyric inventions, pitching his poems to that precarious interval between love and rage. Beneath their formal dexterity and variety, these études sustain a continuous meditation on the concords and dissonances of worshipful life in an age d ominated by spectacle, violence, and environmental devastation. With great skill and compassion, he depicts scenes of domestic life in his adopted home of New Zealand, a transient year of religious and artistic soul-searching in the United Kingdom, and a growing sense of dislocation from his native United States in the Trump era. These are poems of profound contemplative inwardness, conjuring and conversing with a vast tradition of literature, scholarship, and art. Lay Studies is a powerful collection and a welcome music. Cover: Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, 'Bird', 1913–14 (circa). © Kettle's Yard, University of Cambridge  ...Show more

Far Flung by Rhian Gallagher

$25.00 NZD

Category: NZ 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

This Thin Now by Jo Thorpe

$12.00 NZD

$25.00 (52% off)

Category: NZ Poetry

This Thin Now (Hoopla series 2018) tells the story of love lost and of the places the poet goes to find it still – from inside the space two hands make to the numinous blue of sea and sky. These are poems of dazzle and quiet that give the reader a rare gift. 

Tatai Whetu: Seven Maori Women Poets in Translation by Maraea Rakuraku; Vana Manasiadis

$20.00 NZD

Category: NZ Poetry

Tātai Whetū: Seven Māori Women Poets in Translation is a ground-breaking bilingual poetry collection, which features a poem each by seven Māori women writers, originally written in English, and a translation in Māori. The two version of the poems are presented on facing pages. The fourth book in the Ser aph Press Translation Series, Tātai Whetū celebrates Māori writing and the Māori language. Despite its small size, it is already generating a lot of excitement among readers.    ​The featured poets are Anahera Gildea, Michelle Ngamoki, Tru Paraha, Kiri Piahana-Wong, Maraea Rakuraku, Dayle Takitimu and Alice Te Punga Somerville. Their poems have been translated by Hēmi Kelly, Te Ataahia Hurihanganui, Herewini Easton, Jamie Cowell, Vaughan Rapatahana and Dayle Takitimu. The collection has been edited by Maraea Rakuraku and Vana Manasiadis.  This gorgeous chapbook is hand-bound with hemp thread and features cover artwork by Miriama Grace-Smith. ...Show more

Tōku Pāpā / Toku Papa by Ruby Solly

$25.00 NZD

Category: NZ Poetry

When you first told me that you gave me the name of our tupuna so that I would be strong enough to hold our family inside my ribcage, I believed you. Here you are. Here is how I saw you, trapped in your own amber. Now it’s time for you to believe me.  Tōku Pāpā is a book that serves as a map of survival for Māori growing up outside of their papakāika. These poems look at how we take the knowledge we are given by our ancestors and hide it beneath our tongues for safekeeping. They show us how we live with our tūpuna, without ever fully understanding them. This book encompasses a journey spanning generations, teaching us how to keep the home fires burning within ourselves when we have forgotten where our homes are. But have our homes forgotten us? ...Show more

Ransack by Essa May Ranapiri

$25.00 NZD

Category: NZ Poetry

In ransack, essa may ranapiri addresses the difficulty of assembling and understanding a fractured, unwieldy self through an inherited language - a language whose assumptions and expectations ultimately make it inadequate for such a task. These poems seek richer, less hierarchical sets of words to descr ibe ways of being. Punctuated by a sequence of letters to Virginia Woolf's character Orlando, this immersive collection is about discovering, articulating, and defending - to oneself and to others - what it means to exist outside of the western gender binary, as takatapui. It describes an artist in a state of becoming, moving from Te Kore through Te Po and into the light. This is a significant body of work by a seriously talented writer. ...Show more

Craven by Jane Arthur

$25.00 NZD

Category: NZ Poetry

Craven is an exceptional debut: Jane Arthur delights, unnerves and challenges in poems that circle both the everyday and the ineffable - piano practice, past lives, being forced onto dancefloors. This is a smart and disarming collection that traces the ever-changing forms of light and dark in our lives, and how our eyes adjust, despite ourselves, as we go along. ...Show more

How to Be Happy Though Human: New and Selected Poems by Kate Camp

$30.00 NZD

Category: NZ Poetry

A timely collection of new and previously published work by one of Aotearoa’s most acclaimed poets, How to Be Happy Though Human is Kate Camp’s superb seventh book of poetry. It is published simultaneously in Canada and the United States by House of Anansi Press. Kate Camp’s poetry has been described b y critics as ‘fearless’, ‘wry, sympathetic, affable, deadpan’, and ‘containing a surprising radicalism and power’. Incorporating new, previously unpublished work and a selection of important poems from her six earlier collections, How to Be Happy Though Human represents a new chapter in her career. Camp’s debut collection, Unfamiliar Legends of the Stars, won the NZSA Jessie Mackay Best First Book Award for Poetry on publication over twenty years ago. Subsequent books confirmed Camp as a leading voice of her generation: widely anthologised, studied, and cited as an influence by emerging poets. Her work is recognised for its wide-ranging and eclectic subject matter, its technical control and its musicality, with pop culture, high culture, the domestic confessional, close observation and found language featured as recurring elements. Her fourth collection, The Mirror of Simple Annihilated Souls – which shares a title with Belgian mystic Marguerite Porete’s 1310 collection, a book that caused is author to be burned at the stake – won the poetry award at the New Zealand Post Book Awards in 2011 and marked a turn in her work towards darker and more philosophical subject matter. ‘When I yell at North Americans about how we, too, should be reading the living poets of Aotearoa/New Zealand, Kate Camp is one of the poets I have in mind. She’s one of the poets, too, who’s so amazing because  she doesn’t yell: she’s patient with the world and with its seagulls, attentive to the injustice and the kindness and the frustration we can share with one another, if we’re lucky, anyway. What if Elizabeth Bishop had more friends, and more encouragement early on? What if  “sports fields built on rubbish dumps” became safe places to play? What if, in an exquisite pun, we could see “cranes like cranes”? Here are the land and the sea, the children and the grownups too, both as they are and as we wish they could be: here is “the so-called outside world”, and here is its wonderfully sensitive, fluently understated poet, “absolutely fluent . . . yet somewhat on fire”. —Stephanie Burt Poet, essayist and reviewer Kate Camp was born in 1972 and lives in Wellington. She is the winner of many prestigious awards, including the 2011 Creative New Zealand Berlin Writers’ Residency and the 2017 Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship.  ...Show more

Tightrope by Selina Tusitala Marsh

$28.00 NZD

Category: NZ Poetry

Built around the abyss, the tightrope, and the trick that we all have to perform to walk across it, Pasifika poetry warrior Selina Tusitala Marsh brings to life in Tightrope her ongoing dialogue with memory, life and death to find out whether 'stories' really can 'cure the incurable'. In Marsh's poetry, sharp intelligence combines a focused warrior fierceness with perceptive humour and energy, upheld by the mana of the Pacific. ...Show more