The leaf-rideDinah Hawken
Rrp: $30About the poet:
Dinah Hawken was born in Hawera in 1943 and now lives in Wellington, New Zealand. She trained as a physiotherapist, psychotherapist and social worker in New Zealand and the United States and has worked as a student counsellor at Victoria University of Wellington.
Most of the poems in her first collection It Has No Sound and Is Blue were written during a three-year period in New York in the mid-1980s while she was studying for a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Brooklyn College and working with the homeless and mentally ill.
She is the author of five books - It Has No Sound and Is Blue, which won the 1987 Commonwealth Poetry Prize for ‘Best First Time Published Poet’, Small Stories of Devotion; Water, Leaves, Stones and Oh There You Are Tui (2001) which collects the majority of the poems from her earlier books along with a substantial group of new poems.
One Shapely Thing: Poems and Journals was published in April 2006. It was one of three titles shortlisted for Poetry in the Montana New Zealand Book Awards 2007.
Dinah was named the 2007 winner of the biennial Lauris Edmond Award for Distinguished Contribution to Poetry in New Zealand.
Western Line Airini Beautrais
rrp: $28Airini Beautrais’s second book it full of the wit and warmth that distinguished her prize-winning debut. Three entertaining sequences of very short poems – Love Poems, Charms and Curses – (which I especially enjoyed) are followed by a group of innovative longer poems that explore ideas of place and purpose with the deepened insight of early motherhood.
About the poet:
Airini Beautrais's first collection, Secret Heart, won the 2007 Montana New Zealand Book Award for Best First Book. She has a background in ecological science and is a secondary school teacher. She also played for several years in the folk/rock band The Raskolnikovs.
Footnote:
We are most fortunate to have publishers VUP and AUP so dedicated to the publication of New Zealand poetry. There are other publishers in the field of course, one thinks particularly of Wellington-based Steele Roberts, but it would be something of a desert if it were not for our two major university presses.
Thanks guys.
1 comment:
Exception to your comment! What about the wonderful and ever-expanding Wellington based Seraph Press? It is responsible for publishing the talented and fascinating Vivienne Plumb's latest collection, Crumb, as well as her moving and massively under-lauded, in my view, chapbook Scarab; also Vana Manasiadis widely praised, thoroughly engaging and original collection Ithaca Island Bay Leaves; and the clever, quirky collaborative work Locating the Madonna by Jenny Powell-Chalmers and Anna Jackson. And and there are a number of other small but thoroughly important presses - the beautiful Kilmog Press and Pania Press etc - all of which showcase and support original and inspiring voices. Aah, i'm feeling annoyed! It's thanks to the guts and vision of the small presses that New Zealand Poetry doesn't present as quite a monotonous mass - the large University Presses all too often championing a certain wry, too-smart-for-you sort of voice. And I do say this with some restraint, as much of the work published by the big guns is wonderful...but, so, what -is- the word? Samey. Right. I've no particular relationship to any of the presses mentioned, other than admirer of, just feeling the urge to inform.. I dare say there'd be -no- desert if VUP and AUP no longer published poetry...perhaps a migration to some sadly rather unchartered but fascinating rainforest?? Let's be fair!
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