Ian Wedde: 13 books

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,...

Steeped in the brilliance of the banal and the daily splendours of language, Wedde presents a beautifully controlled and ordered sequence of verse in Tendering: New Poems. The book was written, he says, 'in the ghostly presence of my great grandfather Heinrich Augustus Wedde, the last ship-rig pilot...

Tales of Gotham City consists of three groups of poems that were written over a period of seven years, from 1977–83. Ian Wedde says of this collection: When I went 'greedily' looking for meaning among the poems I'd written since about 1977, I found the record of a withdrawal of curiosity, its replacement...

Ian Wedde's latest collection of poems are a complex mix of rhapsody, fear, and humor, and the prose explore the contradictions between life's pool-side surfaces and frightening undertows. Opening with a major new series of poems “The Lifeguard,” it concludes with another long sequence, “Shadow...

Selected stories from one of New Zealand's most well known authors, Ian Wedde. Largely written in the years between 1970 and 1980, the collection includes the award winning Dick Seddon's Great Dive.

The poems that make up Castaly: Poems 1973–77 have been selected by the poet from work completed over the course of four years. Ian Wedde writes: The poems in this book represent my attempts to remain alert in the world between 1973 and 1977. . . . Nevertheless my main obsessions (sometimes called...

The Drummer is Ian Wedde's eighth collection and it is plump with exquisite visual images, lost faith in language, revelations of intense beauty and literary allusions (from the Romantics to the New Zealand tradition). This is what the author writes about his collection: 'The word 'transport' seems...

This collection of poetry features five extended poems that explore the concept of beauty and the nature of language, discussing serious philosophical ideas with zest, energy, wit, and humor. A unique volume featuring remembered and misremembered song lyrics from John Lennon, Lou Reed, Johnny Cash,...

A collection of poems by one of New Zealand's major poets, Spells for Coming Out exhibits a unity derived from mood and circumstance. Memories of Europe, regrets at the absence of 'friends, fugitives and lovers', dominate the opening section, and recur later when the physical scene before the poet...

From jaunty and self-deprecating to serious and nostalgic, the poems in this collection paint a vivid portrait of Wellington businesses and institutions. Quietly hilarious, the verse captures the essence of Toyota, Tony's Tyre Service, Metalworx Engineering, Wellington Scrap Metal, the KFC on the...

A strong new collection from an important poet, his first in seven years. It draws inspiration from the odes of Horace (and Keats), shows a new reflective and sober mood, but also evokes the rich world of the senses and the pleasures of the moment.

Trifecta looks at the odds in the lives of the three children of Martin and Agnes Klepka. Martin was one of the refugees of Nazism who famously brought Modernist architecture and ‘real coffee’ to New Zealand. Many years after his early death from a heart attack, Klepka’s children are struggling...

Christopher Hare has done well for himself: one of the world’s top food writers, he has travelled to the best restaurants in the most exotic locations, accompanied by the chic dining companion known to readers of his lavish books as Thé Glacé. But when the credit crunch ushers in a new age of...