Ahead of his time: The poetry of Iain Lonie

  

Iain Lonie (1932–1988), poet and classical scholar, was a contemporary of Brasch, Baxter and Tuwhare, yet unlike these well-known figures Lonie has been strikingly absent from the map of New Zealand poetry.

A Place To Go On From: The collected poems of Iain Lonie, edited by David Howard, makes available a rich and astounding body of work. As Damian Love says in his essay: to read Lonie now is ‘for most of us, practically to discover a new resource.’

Lonie published five books of poetry and wrote numerous other poems that never appeared in print. ‘The pieces he chose to publish are less striking than those he left on the shelf. If “Elegy to Maecenas”, “Short Story” and “Ugolino and His Sons” had been known by the close of the 1960s then readers might have visited regularly rather than passing by,’ says editor David Howard.

The premature death of his wife Judith had a profound impact on Lonie’s life and work.  With clarity, wit and precision he intimately mapped the borders of death, desire, grief and love.

Lonie’s quiet music, his intimate, personalised subjects, and deft handling of cadence, gave a subtlety to his work that did not conform to the celebrated mode of his day. Yet his deep integrity to the poetic art prefigured developments to come.

‘Lonie’s poetry,’ says David Howard, can now be seen as ‘a major precursor of the personalist domestic mode that came to dominate New Zealand poetry in the decades after his death through figures as diverse as Geoff Cochrane and Jenny Bornholdt’.

This definitive edition, with over a hundred previously unpublished poems, supported by notes that draw from diaries and letters, makes available ‘a body of poems on love and grief and the searing currents of remembrance that, in New Zealand writing, stands alone,’ says Poet Laureate Vincent O’Sullivan.

For younger poets, Lonie’s poetry has become ‘a place to go on from’.

A Place To Go On From

The Collected Poems of Iain Lonie

Edited by

David Howard

Release Date: May 2015

ISBN 978-1-927322-01-7, $50

jacketed hardback with ribbon

www.otago.ac.nz/press

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Editor, David Howard co-founded Takahē magazine (1989), spent 35 years writing The Incomplete Poems (Cold Hub Press, 2011), and collaborated with the artist Peter Ransom on You Look So Pretty When You’re Unfaithful to Me (Holloway Press, 2012). He has received the New Zealand Society of Authors Mid-Career Writers’ Award (2009), the University of South Pacific Poetry Prize (2011), the Robert Burns Fellowship (2013), and the Otago Wallace Residency (2014).