By
Lynley Edmeades
ISBN
978-1-927322-25-3, $25
www.facebook.com/OtagoUniversityPress
As the Verb Tenses is the work of a reflective and sensitive poetic
talent: one run with gleaming wires of joy. In poems that gather together the
vivid details of childhood memory, the surreal juxtapositions of life in the
contemporary West, the wry observations of a temporary expatriate, the deeply
lodged pain of historical and personal loss, Lynley Edmeades speaks to us in
delicately spun lines that press out ironies, dissonances and profound
formative experience.
From playful, rhythmical poems about the art of dinner conversation, to
warm glimpses of intimacy, she lays poetry’s table with the knife of light
satire, the bright salt of wit, the heady wine of love, the bread of knowledge.
This quietly poised, confident first collection has a musical, emotional
and thematic range of a substantial new talent.
‘What a fine reminder this collection is,
of how language is what memory is played on, and gives the moment its flair,
its resonance, its abiding form. I admire As
the Verb Tenses for how the past and the present so vividly ring in lines
of such clarity and precision and deft witty assessing. As wine buffs like to put
it, I was held by its immediate impact, as much as by its maturity and depth.’
– Vincent
O’Sullivan
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Lynley
Edmeades was born in Putaruru. Her poetry, reviews and
academic writing have been
published in New Zealand, the US, Europe
and Australia. In 2011 she completed an MA at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at
Queen’s University, Belfast. She is currently completing a doctoral thesis at
the University of Otago, looking at sound in avant-garde poetics. She lives
in Dunedin with her partner and her cat.
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