Auckland University Press: 301 books

The poems in From the Word Go come in various shapes, sizes and styles. All make language work hard, are vivid and carefully crafted, and put the reader in contact with a lively, inventive mind. The verses are often prose-like, where meaning builds up line by line. Edmond has a fantastic ear and his poems are always enjoyable.

A sense of the romance in music, art, love, and landscapes permeates this lyrical collection from a sophisticated poet. The southern mountains of New Zealand and the towns and countrysides of Italy are among the landscapes evoked in one section. Specially commissioned for this collection, line drawings...

Culled from the author's term as poet laureate, this collection delves into both the present and the past, combining poems of today with those of history. From the inspiring setting of Matahiwi Marae in Hawke's Bay to the beautiful backdrop of Florence, Italy, this anthology explores the fascinating...

Spanning the impressive careers of five notable New Zealand women, this uncommon examination portrays the lives of Merimeri Penfold, Margaret Mahy, Anne Salmond, Gaylene Preston, and Jacqueline Fahey. Having each carved out their own distinguished reputations as artists, writers, teachers, filmmakers,...

The Blue Voyage and Other Poems is a new collection by Anne French – elegiac in tone and confident in execution. A more comic initial section (by noted New Zealand regional poet ‘William Butler Smith') leads into a section of thoughtful but vivid sailing poems and then a number of elegies, laments...

Murray Edmond, a well-established poet, writes in Laminations a savage, witty new collection that reflects the times we live in. These polished verses lament the end of the century and celebrate sound, rhythm and word play. Edmond's work sits at the intersection of the personal and historical, and...

From whalers and traders marrying into Maori families in the early 19th century to the growth of interracial marriages in the later 20th, Matters of the Heart unravels the long history of interracial relationships in New Zealand. It encompasses common law marriages and Maori customary marriages, alongside...

Originally commissioned as the libretto for a work by composer John Psathas for the 50th birthday celebration of the Orpheus Choir, this book-length poem offers fresh perspectives on the familiar story of Cook's Pacific explorations. Employing a broad bicultural approach to reinterpret the Orpheus...

Love and the rearticulation of New Zealand mythology from a Polynesian perspective are the central themes of this new collection of Hawaii-based Maori poetry. The poems open up two cultural traditions—a Polynesian oral tradition and a written European tradition—with subjects that range from ancient...

Paula Green writes about her own life as a mother of three daughters and as a poet. She uses the metaphor of food, cooking and meals to represent the nurturing, caring experience of women and also the poet's loving concern for language and fondness for others who have worked with words.

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...

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...