TUESDAY POEM

Tuesday Poem features PM Award-winner Peter Bland's Song

Hot on the heels of the PM's Award for Poetry which he won last week, Peter Bland has launched a new collection Coming Ashore (Steele Roberts) and is online today as the featured poet on Tuesday Poem. Christchurch poet Jeffrey Paparoa Holman launched Coming Ashore in Wellington, and as editor of the Tuesday Poem this week has selected Peter Bland's poem "Song". He says of it:

'This poem, “Song”, is one of my favourites, of many choice pieces here: the viewing persona observes a next door neighbour, a Chinese woman, quite elderly it seems, singing as she hangs out her washing. In 21 carefully crafted and understated lines, Peter Bland brings her to life: the song, the strange quality of otherness and the keening for home its sounds evoke, “full of comings and goings/like the sea on/a calm day when/it drifts in exhausted". '

Jeffrey says Peter Bland deserves his PM Award 'richly' and goes on to describe Coming Ashore as a whole:

'...a rich collection of elegy and history, and sharply-observed images of the inner and outer life of the poet through his bicultural world views....'

After reading the hub poem on Tuesday Poem, take time to enter the sidebar for more Tuesday Poems. Highlights include a poem about Hurricane Irene by Boston poet Melissa Green, a video of Sharon Olds reading, and a poem by Robert Sullivan commissioned for the new steps of Auckland City Central Library! And there is that wonderful host of poems by NZ locals including Sarah Broom, Tim Jones, Helen Rickerby, Andrew Bell,  Saradha Koirala, Mary McCallum ... as well as some classics: Lawrence and Shelley, and more will go up as the day progresses.