New Zealand Poet Laureate Possibility

My apologies to Rhian Gallagher, Vincent O'Sullivan and readers for my misreading of Vincent's post which resulted in me posting on my blog that Rhian had been appointed Poet Laureate.

Rhian Gallagher

20 May, 2015

When Rhian Gallagher returned from almost two decades out of the country, and won the NZ Post Award in 2011, it seemed to me that there was a perceptible addition to what went on in our poetry.

Here was a freshly attentive linguistic edge, a direct sensual intensity, a focus and gutsiness in writing of memory and regret, that seemed just that bit different from what any other writer here was doing. One reviewer called her poems ‘assiduously polished’, another picked up on ‘the visceral strength of her language’. What I admired then I find there again to admire in these unpublished poems. 
I’m glad my almost last laureate blog becomes the forum to display them.

– Vincent O’Sullivan