HOW TO SURVIVE THE MORNING

Kevin Ireland - Cape Catley - $23.99

The back cover blurb sums it up wonderfully:

Kevin Ireland's seventeenth book of poems cocks an amused, satiric, shrewd and always deadly serious eye at life, love and landscape.

There are conversations with the neighbours, thoughts on the weather, birthdays, writers and writing, dreams, milking a cow and the Treaty. Then the book ends abruptly with first reactions to the sudden death of his wife:

I reach for a pen.

My hand fails.

It draws a wavering line

under an emptiness.

History was made last evening in Auckland maritime suburb of Devonport when author Kevin Ireland had two books launched simultaneously, one, the above, a collection of verse while the other, below, a science fiction novel.

Photo left shows poet Ireland in full flight, next to him, and obviously enjoying the moment, Christine Cole-Catley of Cape Catley Publishers.

THE JIGSAW CHRONICLES

Kevin Ireland - Cape Catley -$27.99

I am not a science fiction fan but this is what the publisher has to say about this book:

Deep within our everyday lives are existences that might be possible. Brook is a lawyer. Then one day he enters a misty doorway into a world which the Russian revolutionary Trotsky has transformed into perpetual revolution and he gradually comes to understand that he has merely imagined his former condition, that his name is Johnny and that this is the way things truly are. As Johnny struggles to reassemble and record an authentic history of himself and his world, he must confront events that move suddenly to exterminate him and the millions he dwells among.

Kevin Ireland lives in Devonport. He became the second recipient of the Prime Minister's Award for Poetry in 2004 and has published 17 books of poetry and numerous fiction and non-fiction volumes including How to Catch a Fish and Getting Away with it.