Author(s): Lauris Edmond

NZ Poetry

Lauris Edmond was 51 when with Denis Glover's encouragement she published her first volume of poetry (In Middle Air, 1975). Until then, as a wife and the mother of six children, writing had been, as she said in her autobiography, 'a completely private act'. Within just ten years however, so welcoming was the response to her distinctive, new poetic voice, she became one of the most public figures among New Zealand writers. As early as 1981 she was awarded the Katherine Mansfield Fellowship at Menton. In 1985 she won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for her first Selected Poems (1984). In 1986 she received the OBE for services to literature. Her creative abundance and her accumulation of honours continued undiminished into her later years. In this collection is a selection of Lauris Edmond's best-known poems, read by the poet and her daughter. A moving and magical expression of the lifetime's work of a much loved poet, recorded just before she died.
CD & booklet