Things OK with you? by Vincent O'Sullivan

$25.00 NZD

Category: Poetry

Know what a thing’s called, and we own it; if not, there’s really only pointing, our still wishing we knew. The afternoon wilts round its edges, unless we’ve said it. Things OK with you? is Vincent O’Sullivan’s first collection of poems since Being Here: Selected Poems (2015) and And So It Is: New Poem s (2016). His Selected Stories was published in 2019 and The Dark Is Light Enough: Ralph Hotere in 2020. ...Show more

On We Go by Catherine Bagnall & L. Jane Sayle

$35.00 NZD

Category: Poetry

A remarkable collaboration between an artist and a poet, On We Go belongs to the emerging forms of ecological thinking that cross genres and scientific disciplines, speaking directly about global warming and the perils facing the natural world.

The Mermaid's Purse by Fleur Adcock

$25.00 NZD

Category: Poetry

Fleur Adcock began writing the poems in this book when she was 82. The two chief settings are New Zealand, with its multi-coloured seas, and Britain, seen in various decades. There are foreign travels, flirtations, family memories, deaths and conversations with the dead. Katherine Mansfield, incognito, dodges an academic conference; there’s a lesson in water divining as well as a rather unusual Christmas party. We meet several varieties of small mammal, numerous birds, doomed or otherwise, and some sheep. The book ends with a sequence in memory of her friend, the poet Roy Fisher. ...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

Escape Path Lighting by John Newton

$25.00 NZD

Category: Poetry | Reading Level: near fine

A drunken poet obliged to choose between Art and Love. What could possibly go wrong? Rock Oyster Island. It's a slack kind of place, but that's the way the locals like it: lifestyle farmers, pensioned-off bikers, seekers and healers, meth cooks and fishing guides. It's only a ferry ride to the city but the modern world feels blessedly remote. Working hard is not greatly valued. Mild Pacific sunshine pours down unfailingly. When Arthur Bardruin, fugitive poet, washes up on Marigold Ingle's beach, he dares to hope he may be safe from the gaze of the Continence Police. With Marigold and her parrot, Chuck, he finds an indulgent sanctuary. But the reach of aesthetic decorum is long. A chilly wind is blowing through Paradise . . . Meanwhile, at the Blue Pacific Wellness Farm, Juanita Diaz, Lacanian analyst, has problems with dissolute musician Frank Hortune, who has problems with his mother and a glad eye for Juanita's lover. Where did Chuck learn his bad-tempered Spanish? Can Juanita keep her man on the couch? Can Bardruin keep his trousers on? Will poetry be the winner on the day? John Newton's verse novel Escape Path Lighting is a throwaway epic, a romp, a curmudgeonly manifesto. The verse bowls along like a summer breeze. The satire leaves no target unscathed. ...Show more

Family Instructions Upon Release by Elizabeth Kirby-Mcleod

$25.00 NZD

Category: Poetry

Social Media by MARY MACPHERSON

$25.00 NZD

Category: Poetry

Is our identity more of a composite than we realise? We often think of ourselves as formed from our core values or our DNA, but in Social Media, Mary Macpherson explores identity as a creation of the interactions we have with others: friends, family and the wider world, and the evolving role technology now plays in this. A playful and provocative collection that drills into our social and media selves using elements from short stories and film scripts. ...Show more

Michael, I thought you were dead by Michael Fitzsimons

$25.00 NZD

Category: Poetry

I have a growing number of scars. A three-inch horizontal scar across the stomach, very tidy. Two more small ones either side of the rib cage and now one on the hand and arm to deal with a Viking inheritance. I look at them in the mirror. I hope they don't fade away completely. They are my body art. My favourite poet with a ponytail greets me warmly at the launch of his latest book of poems. Michael, he says, I thought you were dead. Now the stars are burning brightly. I am an explorer of a world beyond the letterbox. By the time I get to Nelson I will be singing again. The heart asks only for more. Michael Fitzsimons gets the news no one wants to hear and finds fear and uncertainty have taken up residence in his house, muting joy and putting the world as he knows it on hold. But in time he discovers that while his life might look like a shipwreck, there's a lifeboat waiting to take him away to a new place, where the most ordinary things gleam with their own extravagance and sorrow slowly gives way to moments of praise. To read Michael, I thought you were dead is to take up an oar and row the same boat a while - a ride not to be missed. ...Show more

How I Get Ready by Ashleigh Young

$25.00 NZD

Category: Poetry

In her latest poetry collection How I Get Ready, Ashleigh Young fails to learn to drive, vanishes from the fossil record, and finally finishes writing a book. An Ashleigh Young poem is a world: hospitable, strange, a little off kilter. The poems in How I Get Ready bristle with humour and curiosity; the y are idiosyncratically observant and keenly empathetic. That empathy is extended to the reader – the poems confide and beguile, providing access not just to the speaker’s travails but also to those of lives remote in history: the compulsive disorder of a sensitive young man living in the early 20th Century, for example, or the emotional anguish of the late medieval mystic, Margery Kempe. ...Show more

Brian Turner: Selected Poems by Brian Turner

$40.00 NZD

Category: Poetry | Reading Level: near fine

This book is the first to represent the full extent of Brian Turner's achievement as a poet, from his Commonwealth Poetry Prize-winning debut, Ladders of Rain, to poems written in 2018. One of New Zealand's most acclaimed and widely read contemporary poets, Turner is a proud southerner, and the landscap es and skyscapes of the central South Island are amongst the strongest characteristics of his work. His themes range widely, and make striking connections poems about fathers and sons are also poems about the duties of care we owe to the natural world; love poems open out into metaphysical inquiry; satire keeps close company with political protest. Turner's work is distinguished always by his unmistakable wit and feeling, precision and insight. ...Show more

Live Oak, with Moss by Walt Whitman; Brian Selznick (Illustrator); Karen Karbiener (Afterword by)

$50.00 NZD

Category: Poetry | Reading Level: near fine

As he was turning forty, Walt Whitman wrote twelve poems in a small handmade book he entitled "Live Oak, With Moss." The poems were intensely private reflections on his attraction to and affection for other men. They were also Whitman's most adventurous explorations of the theme of same-sex love, compos ed decades before the word "homosexual" came into use. This revolutionary, extraordinarily beautiful and passionate cluster of poems was never published by Whitman and has remained unknown to the general public--until now. New York Times bestselling and Caldecott Award-winning illustrator Brian Selznick offers a provocative visual narrative of "Live Oak, With Moss," and Whitman scholar Karen Karbiener reconstructs the story of the poetic cluster's creation and destruction. Walt Whitman's reassembled, reinterpreted Live Oak, With Moss serves as a source of inspiration and a cause for celebration. ...Show more

End of the Golden Weather by Bruce Mason

$20.00 NZD

Category: Poetry | Series: VUP Classics

Description: First performed in 1959, The End of the Golden Weather has become a part of New Zealand history, a touchstone of New Zealand experience. Unable to earn a living as a playwright in a country without a professional theatre, Bruce Mason presented, in fear and trembling, this story of a young b oy's extraordinary summer on a beach. Between 1959 and 1978, when illness forced his retirement from the stage, he performed it nearly 1000 times, in theatres, school halls, church halls and community halls throughout New Zealand.   Contents: Bruce Mason is the most significant playwright in New Zealand's theatrical history. Of his more than thirty plays several have become classics, including The Pohutukawa Tree, which has been produced over 100 times around the world. In 1977 he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Literature by Victoria University. In 1980 he was made a CBE and in 1982 he was given the New Zealand Literary Fund Award for Achievement. Bruce Mason died in 1983.         ...Show more