New poetry collection from Peter Olds

Publisher Roger Hickin is pleased with this one :

This is a bloody marvellous collection. The Listener chose it as one of the best poetry books for 2014. And so they should have.

YOU FIT THE DESCRIPTION

the selected poems of Peter Olds:

Chosen by the NZ Listener

as one of the best poetry books of 2014

  

This new selection of poems by Peter Olds gathers a more generous sampling than his 1972–2001 selected poems (It Was a Tuesday Morning, Hazard Press, 2004) as well as work from collections published since then, and twenty-five previously uncollected poems. But perhaps most importantly it includes a number of the celebrated longer poems of the 1970s and 1980s which were left out of the Hazard selection. In print again at last here are Freeway (“will be seen to be a work which is central to the development of a genuinely New Zealand literature” ––Bill Dean, Critic); Lady Lust revisiting the Great Psychiatric Rock & Roll Nostalgia Story; Beethoven’s guitar (“an immensely vital poem about life in a psychiatric hospital” ––Peter Simpson, The Press); Notes on State Highway Number One (“something of the devil-may-care exhilaration of Goodbye Pork Pie” ––Frank McKay, The Listener); along with After the music and After looking for Broadway.

From the steam of Joe Tui’s long-gone Dunedin fish-and-chip shop

to a young possum clinging to a plum tree, via substance-fuelled manic narrative, Zen solitude and vivid evocations of childhood, by turns playful, anxious and outrageous, Peter Olds keeps watch with an always compassionate eye and with not too much thought about literature gets it all down with unpretentious drop-dead authenticity.

In an extensive introduction Ian Wedde fits Olds into a national and international context, then focuses on the “mindfulness” of the poet’s vision, from his early immersion in the conditions of addiction and mental illness, to his humorous, compassionate and expanding sense of relationship, and his awareness “not just of the present moment but of the consciousness that focuses the poet’s attention”.

“We’re used to thinking of consciousness as involving an awareness of here and there, inner and outer, self and other, experience from the inside, appearance from the outside.  This … New Zealand poet’s commitment to making poetry the game-breaker of this dichotomy has been unremitting for more than forty years. And I have to say . . . it’s been a hell of a ride.”  ––Ian Wedde

“In my mind’s bookshelf, this poet of the Dunedin I hold dear sits companionably between Baxter and Tuwhare.”   ––Cilla McQueen

“Peter Olds’s poems are often moving and gruelling for their honesty about both the euphoria and the aftermath of pushing oneself to the edge of experience. They’re often vivid, visual, social realist and darkly wry pictures of New Zealand city and town life. They can give the impression of being spontaneous photographs, apparently casually documentary. And yet the more you re-read them, the clearer it is that they are carefully, consciously framed. Laced throughout with a redemptive wit and humour, they are frank about workers’, bohemians’ and bene-ficiaries’ struggles with institutions, conformity, urban disconnection and alienation; and frank about the tenuous grip many New Zealanders have, post welfare state reforms, on basic comforts and human rights: health, shelter, community, a place to stand and belong.”  ––Emma Neale

 

Peter Olds:You fit the description

with an introduction by Ian Wedde

ISBN: 978-0-473-29803-6

Softcover with flaps 296pp, 250 x 180mm

NZ$49.95 from good bookstores

or www.coldhubpress.co.nz