Shape of the Heart by Kevin Ireland

$24.99 NZD

Category: Poetry

Fragments from an Infinite Catalogue by John Tāne Christeller

$30.00 NZD

Category: Poetry

Upturned by Kay McKenzie Cooke

$25.00 NZD

Category: Poetry

Kay McKenzie Cooke chronicles life as it comes to her – the quotidian happenings in and around her home in Dunedin and further south where she grew up, and not-so-ordinary upturned world she experiences when she visits her son in Berlin. And then there are those things that seem ordinary enough un til the poet flips them over so she can locate the beating heart.  Whānau and tūpuna (Kay is Ngāi Tahu and Pākehā) and the natural world are the places Kay is happiest and she writes with candour about grief and joy, loss and discovery. What comes through time and again in her work is a deep resilience born of always having one eye on the great mountains and rivers of the south and the other on the small things people hold close to make sense of an increasingly perplexing world. ...Show more

Funkhaus by Hinemoana Baker

$25.00 NZD

Category: Poetry

A queer / takatapui Maori writer living in Berlin, Germany since 2015, Hinemoana Baker brings a unique perspective both to and from the 'global North'. Drawing on the German meaning of the word 'funken' - to send a radio signal - her latest collection broadcasts unsettling songs of rebirth, love, friend ship and alienation across homes and languages, to the living and to the dead. Funkhaus is home to big, punchy poems and shimmering delicacy, as well as Hinemoana's trademark humour. This book invites readers to tune out the crackle and static, and dial in their own receivers to a signal that has travelled a long way to reach them, no matter where they are. ...Show more

Dumpty: The Age of Trump in Verse by John Lithgow

$39.99 NZD

Category: Poetry

Award-winning actor and bestselling author John Lithgow wields a whip-smart, satirical pen in this poetic diatribe chronicling the last few abysmal years in politics. With lacerating wit, he takes readers verse by verse through the history of Donald Trump's presidency, lampooning the likes of Betsy DeVo s, Anthony Scaramucci, Scott Pruitt, Paul Manafort, Trump's doctors, and many others. Illustrated from cover to cover with Lithgow's never-before-seen line drawings, the poems collected in Dumpty draw inspiration from A. A. Milne, Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Mother Goose, and many more. A YUGE feat of laugh-out-loud lyrical storytelling, this hilarious and timely volume is bound to bring joy to poetry lovers, political junkies, and Lithgow fans. ...Show more

Conventional Weapons by Tracey Slaughter

$25.00 NZD

Category: Poetry

Conventional Weapons is Tracey Slaughter's first full poetry collection. In these dark, lyrical poems, Slaughter closely observe the textures of the world and the beauty and depravity of human nature.

How To Live by Helen Rickerby

$24.99 NZD

Category: Poetry | Reading Level: near fine

Winner - Ockham NZ Book Awards - Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry 2020 A new poetry collection that takes readers among ‘the unsilent women’, from Hipparchia to J. K. Rowling. ‘Women who speak have always been monstrous. That twisty sphinx, those tempting sirens; better plug your ears with wax, boys.’ Where are the female philosophers? Why are women silenced? Who can tell us how to live? In her fourth collection of poetry, Helen Rickerby takes readers on a journey into women’s writing, a quest for philosophical answers, and an investigation of poetic form. The poems in How to Live engage in a conversation with ‘the unsilent women’ – Hipparchia and George Eliot, Ban Zhao and Mary Shelley. They do so in order to explore philosophical and practical questions: how one could or should live a good life, how to be happy, how to not die, how to live. Rickerby thinks through the ways that poetry can build up and deconstruct a life, how the subtext and layers inherent in poetry can add to the telling of a life story, and how different perspectives can be incorporated into one work – the place where poetry meets essay, where fiction meets non-fiction, where biography meets autobiography, where plain-speaking meets lyricism, where form pushes against digression. The work is witty (‘Perhaps I should ban “perhaps”.’) and self-reflexive (‘Am I afraid that if I let the words leak out, they’ll mix with oxygen and become prose?’) as Rickerby draws on the intensity, symbolism and layering of poetic form, using poetry as a space of exploration of ideas, of thinking, of essaying. ...Show more

Edgeland: And Other Poems by David Eggleton

$27.50 NZD

Category: Poetry

The poetry in David Eggletons new collection "possesses an intensity and driven energy, using the poets recognisable signature oratory voice, strong in beat and measure, rooted in rich traditions of chant, lament and ode.Mashing together the lyrical and the slangy, celebrating local vernaculars whilesim ultaneously plugged in to a global zeitgeist of technobabble and fake news, Eggleton recycles and repurposes high visual culture and demotic aural culture." ...Show more

Time of the Icebergs: Poems by David Eggleton

$25.00 NZD

Category: Poetry | Reading Level: Scholarly/Undergraduate

Much of Time of the Icebergs was written while David Eggleton was a Writer-in-Residence at the Michael King Writers Centre in Auckland in 2009. These are poems about the world we live in, tracing a dystopian present 'hurtling globalisation's highway' where 'Google tells Google that Google saves' As he s ays 'I think of it as a collection for browsing and discovering things: soundscapes, seascapes, landscapes, contemporary politics and contemporary people, histories, traditions, and other things besides.' In this time of winebars and infotainment, 'Ngati Cappuccino and Ngati Bogan' stalk the streets bent beneath hoodies and 'boxy four-wheel-drives plane through the wet' piloted by 'yummy mummies'. Titles of poems reflect the absurdities of 21st century existence: 'Kate Winslet Promotes a Credit Card' riffs off an ad in the New Yorker, while 'Not for Human Consumption', and 'Twenty Second Century' hint at the ecological chaos of the modern world. Name-droppers, debt-dodgers, ghettoised gods and 'Vern Acular, that good keen bloke' all make an appearance, as does the lost five-cent coin. Poems set in Suva, Sydney, Christchurch, Auckland and Dunedin locate this book firmly in the South Pacific. Eggleton traverses the country: from Cantabrian landscapes of 'a geology sculpted into fists' and Dunedin 'tipped out of a colonial toy-box' to North Island summer idylls where you could 'follow a jiggle-string of beach pulled taut by the soaraway kite of blue sky'. Nationality and 'kiwiness' are under investigation. This is no mere intellectual exercise as through it all thrums the steady beat of life. ...Show more

The Conch Trumpet by David Eggleton

$25.00 NZD

Category: Poetry | Reading Level: General Adult

The Conch Shell calls to the scattered tribes of contemporary New Zealand. It sounds the signal to listen close, critically and 'in alert reverie'. David Eggleton's reach of references, the marriage of high and low, the grasp of popular and classical allusion, his eye both for cultural trash and epiphan ic beauty, make it seem as if here Shakespeare shakes down in the Pacific. There are dazzling compressions of history; astonishing paens to harbours, mountains, lakes and rivers; wrenchingly dark, satirical critiques of contemporary politics, of solipsism, narcissism, the apolitical, the corporate, with a teeming vocabulary to match. And often too a sense of the imperative, grounding reality of the phenomenal world - the thisness of things: Cloud whispers brush daylight's ear; fern question-marks form a bush encore; forlorn heat swings cobbed in webs. - from 'Nor-wester Flying' In this latest collection David Eggleton is court jester/philosopher/lyricist, and a kind of male Cassandra, roving warningly from primeval swampland to gritty cityscape to the information and disinformation cybercloud. ...Show more

Born to a Red-Headed Woman by Kay McKenzie Cooke

$25.00 NZD

Category: Poetry | Reading Level: Very Good

Using the extraordinary capacity of music to revive the places and people from our pasts, this poetic memoir springs from over 50 song titles or song lines and spans more than four decades. Laconic, wry, subtly philosophical, Kay McKenzie Cooke's new collection carries us from her rural Southland girlho od in the 1950s and 60s to the bitter pressures of adopting out her baby as a teenager in the 1970s, and to her present as grandmother, mother, wife and author. A plain-spoken honesty, a sensitivity to the natural world, a gentle humour, a deep sense of how the richness of our relationships lodges in ordinary rituals and routines: all combine in a quietly moving autobiography. Born to a Red-Headed Woman is documentary, vivid, ever grounded in the workaday detail of farming, the changing decades, family, city life and job. Yet at times the language peels right back to the tender nerve of major, formative losses. If Cooke's observations of the daily are the simple melodic lines that seem to coast on the surface, beneath that runs a rich bass line of meditation on time, on meaning, how to live a life true to oneself, and to familial love. ...Show more

South D Poet Lorikeet by Jenny Powell

$29.95 NZD

Category: Poetry

I am the bird who appears in your dreams / I am the bird whose song you hear / I am the flash of feathered blaze / I am still a surprise to you. In South D Poet Lorikeet Jenny Powell, with her customary acuteness and lightness of touch, writes of girlhood, difference, displacement, losing one's footing, peering into the looking glass. Permeated with colour, time, identity and love, these new poems deconstruct and reconstruct and curve in unexpected directions, with key words that repeat and bind like fine strands, and themes that twist and replicate like the patterns of DNA. ...Show more