Selected Poems by Ian Wedde; John Reynolds (Illustrator)

$40.00 NZD

Category: Poetry / Plays

Ian Wedde has been a major presence in New Zealand poetry since his work began appearing in journals in the late 1960s. His first book of poetry appeared in 1971; his sixth book won the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry in 1978; his sixteenth and most recent was a finalist in 2014. By the mid-1980s, as well as shaping his own verse, he had become an influential critic and shaper of larger trends in poetry as one of the co-editors of The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse (1985) and The Penguin Book of Contemporary New Zealand Poetry - Nga Kupu Titohu o Aotearoa (1989). ...Show more

What I Lick Before Your Face ... and Other Haikus by Dogs by Jamie Coleman

$26.00 NZD

Category: Poetry / Plays

Imagine if your dog could talk to you. Better still, imagine if it could express its innermost feelings in poetic form. This hilarious, insightful book confirms what we've all long suspected - that inside every dog is the soul of a poet. From retrieving sticks to rivalry with cats; from cold winter wal ks to endlessly chasing tennis balls, no stone of a dog's life is left unturned. With a delightful photo alongside every haiku, this is the perfect gift for any dog lover. ...Show more

Tightrope by Selina Tusitala Marsh

$29.00 NZD

Category: Poetry / Plays | Reading Level: Very Good

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

Penguin's Poems for Weddings by Laura Barber (ed.)

$26.00 NZD

Category: Poetry / Plays | Reading Level: very good

Now in paperback, a wonderful anthology of wedding poems, filled with surprising, curious, unorthodox and charming poems about love and the public commitment to love. For the many thousands of readers who each year go through the complex mix of thrill and trauma that is the planning of a marriage ceremo ny, Laura Barber's anthology is the answer to a prayer, with a wonderfully generous and unusual selection of poems suitable for reading out loud, and which celebrate and encapsulate our deepest feelings in all their bewildering diversity. Including verse by poets ranging from John Keats to Carol Ann Duffy and Walt Whitman to W. H. Auden, as well as many less familiar voices, this anthology offers numerous options for anyone about to read at the wedding of family or friends, or to celebrate their own. ...Show more

How to be Dead in a Year of Snakes by Chris Tse

$25.00 NZD

Category: Poetry / Plays | Reading Level: Very Good

In 1905, white supremacist Lionel Terry murdered the Cantonese gold prospector Joe Kum Yung to draw attention to his crusade to rid New Zealand of Chinese and other East Asian immigrants. Chris Tse uses this story - and its reenactment for a documentary a hundred years later - to reflect on the experien ces of Chinese migrants of the period, their wishes and hopes, their estrangement and alienation, their ghostly reverberation through a white-majority culture. Along the way we visit the gold fields of the south, a shipwreck in the Hokianga that left the spirits of 500 Chinese goldminers in an unmemorialised limbo for a hundred years and the streets of Newtown, Wellington, where Lionel Terry went out one night 'looking for a Chinaman'. Chris Tse's flickering use of imagery, resonant language and flexible pronouns are particularly suited to the historic events he describes and the viewpoints he shifts through. How to be Dead in a Year of Snakes is a welcome poetic addition to New Zealand literature. ...Show more

Cat Poems by Various

$19.00 NZD

Category: Poetry / Plays

You Know How a Cat will bring a mouse it has caught and lay it at your feet so each morning I bring you a poem that I've written when I woke up in the night as my tribute to your beauty &a promise of my love.-James Laughlin Across the ages, cats have provided their adopted humans with companionship , affection, mystery, and innumerable metaphors. Cats raise a mirror up to their beholders; cats endlessly captivate and hypnotise, frustrate and delight. To poets, in particular, these enigmatic creatures are the most delightful and beguiling of muses, as they purr, prowl, hunt, play, meow, and nap, often oblivious to their so-called masters. Cat Poems offers a litter of odes to our beloved felines by some of the greatest poets of all time. ...Show more

Frost Fair by Carol Ann Duffy; David de las Heras (Illustrator)

$20.00 NZD

Category: Poetry / Plays

The tenth and final Christmas book, set in the frost fairs on London's Thames in the 16th-century, from UK Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy. Beautifully illustrated and produced in a gorgeous small format, this is an irresistible festive gift and Christmas stocking must-have for poetry lovers.

View from the South by Owen Marshall

$40.00 NZD

Category: NZ - Poetry / Plays

A stunning collection of poems from one of New Zealand's most respected writers. David Eggleton wrote of Marshall's poetry in the New Zealand Listenerthat, 'Above all, the poems are redolent of the South Island - all wild winds and dry hills, sleepy summer afternoons, the shimmer of light on lakes, sno w like whitewash on the Alps.' In addition his poetry captures the voice and perspective of the South Island, whether it is contemplating family or friends, love or mortality, the local landscape or further afield, through place or time. This collection brings together Marshall's most powerful poetry from his previous three collections with many more recent works. They are complemented by photographs taken by his friend and fellow Mainlander Grahame Sydney. 'They are an exquisite marriage of musicality, observation, elegance and economy. Certain words stand out in his lines like the glint of light on wet ground.' - Paula Green, New Zealand Herald. ...Show more

Heartland by Michele Leggott

$28.00 NZD

Category: Poetry / Plays

I stood in the dark with many others, some of them close enough to touch, some further away. One by one they turned, light fell on faces that were at once strange and familiar, and they began to speak or sing. Soon the riot of their voices was everywhere, the plane of memory tilted at 36,000 feet, fract als caught in the blink of an eye, the clearing of a throat. Heart us invisibly they said, and I saw the land waiting to invent its people. We walk into the clearing, we wait for light to saturate the eye, we remember. Michele Leggott’s new book of poetry follows on from her 2009 collection, Mirabile Dictu, in its exploration of light and of gathering dark. Leggott is a poet of the lilting, shining moment and the sections here follow some of her own moments and movements, experiments and experiences – to Devonport, to Australia, to the north – as well as reverberating with the stories and histories of others. The book’s final two sections take this exploration of character and narrative further as in one we see off a soldier – shadowed by Leggott – to the First World War; and in the other – set in an earlier, unspecified time charted for us by telegraphic weather reports – a family tragedy unfolds, until a body is finally brought home for burial. With her ‘dear shapes gone to sound’, Leggott’s textured poem-scapes are more aurally charged than ever, like a ‘piano in a dark room that is / quite what it is like and never the same’. A splendid, immersive collection of poetry, Heartland is also, Leggott says, ‘a destination and a song, a shadow and a single word with two chambers’. ...Show more

The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi by Eugene Ostashevsky

$26.00 NZD

Category: Poetry / Plays

The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi is a poem-novel about the relationship between a pirate and a parrot who, after capturing a certain quantity of prizes, are shipwrecked on a deserted island, where they proceed to discuss whether they would have been able to make themselves understood by peop le indigenous to the island, had there been any. Eugene Ostashevsky's first large-scale project since The Life and Opinions of DJ Spinoza, this new book pursues the themes of emigration, incomprehension, and the otherness of others in a far more complicated and persistent way than its predecessor. Characterized by multilingual punning, humor puerile and set-theoretic, philosophical irony, and narratological handicaps, The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi draws on early-modern texts about pirates and animal intelligence, 1960s Russian folklore, old-school hip-hop, game theory, controversies of copyright, and Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, abbreviated as PI. ...Show more

Say It Naked

$25.00 NZD

Category: Poetry / Plays

The Yield by Sue Wootton

$26.00 NZD

Category: Poetry / Plays | Reading Level: Very Good

Wootton addresses subjects as various as the fraught relationship between medical institutions and individual suffering, the disintegration of the polar icecaps, the energizing power of solitude and the rewarding demands of creativity and love. This is a collection about give and take, loss and gain; ab out sowing, tending and reaping. Sue Wootton brings her characteristic linguistic dexterity, exuberance and versatility to every page. The Yield is rich harvest. ...Show more