Australian & Oceanian

This collection of new work by award-winning New Zealand poet Frankie McMillan features the horse as a central motif. The poems-gorgeous, haunting, and beautifully strange-tingle with a sense of the ineffable, like certain chords in musical pieces. One...

Young Country is a book of poetry by twenty-first-century writer Kerry Hines alongside images by nineteenth-century photographer William Williams. The wry, plainspoken but haunting poems sit alongside evocative photographs of settlement: landscapes,...

I am seconds away from everything. I am the bullseye of the world. A Lack of Good Sons is a book of poetry that carries us through many realms – Greek myth, the Bible, dream, and the earthly world, with all its beauty and violence. An eclectic range of...

Harry Ricketts has written and edited more than thirty books, but it is his poetry that has been the most constant, and the most personal in tone. From his 1989 collection Coming Here – in which he wrote the first of his ‘Secret Life’ poems – to his 2018...

Our mother's clouds and insects fly to embrace your clouds and insects. Her architecture, roads, bridges and infrastructure rush to greet yours. Her molecules on their upward trajectory entwine with yours, the colour of her eyes, hair and skin. Her...

This collection offers 40 new poems from poet Apirana Taylor. Inspired by nature and mythology, he shifts his focus from the mundane to the mysterious, and with characteristic wit and intensity shares his delight and despair in what he discovers...

This 2-CD set of classsic New Zealand poets reading their own work includes pieces from James Baxter, Allen Curnow, Janet Frame, and Denis Glover. Accompanied by a book of text that reproduces the poems exactly as they are read, brief biographies and...

You think of the Brighton Rock film where Helen Mirren still manages to look like Queen Elizabeth, especially when she wears a headscarf. You think of the poem you wrote about leaving a house, and how houses we have owned will come back to us in dreams...

The pilgrim poems in this collection persuade the other poems and the readers to join them on a quest for personal meaning. All the while there is the feeling that the movement forward is really towards the place where it all began. There's a Medical...

This is the definitive collection of work by New Zealand's most distinguished poet. Throughout his lifetime, Allen Curnow revised, selected and collected his poetry in various ways. For the first time, this collection brings together all of the poems...

Relaxed and intimate, engaging and wise, ""Incognito"" is Jessica Le Bas's first book. Her poems have been carefully collected but are wonderfully various. Themes, characters and voices come and go as the poet moves in and out of...

Ian Wedde's new poetry collection, his fourteenth, finds him still in business. At the heart of the book is the stunning 'Good Business' sequence, at once an ode to walking the side-streets of central Wellington and an elegy for the poet's father...

How does 'music hold us up'? In The Blind Singer, Wellington writer Chris Price 'cultivates the art / of listening' to explore this question. She has a clear and precise ear and the poems dance and shimmer around a??the heart of our hearing'. And she...

The Red Tram by C K Stead is another fine collection by one of New Zealand?s best writers. It includes some Auckland poems, some moving memories of childhood, poems about horses and cows, even one about his own legs. There are his usual satirical poems...

A new collection of poetry by a self-confessed 'ranter', Fast Talker is energetic, contemporary, and filled with an emphatic, punchy political and social awareness. Some of the poems are indeed Eggleton's well-known 'rants' - part showman patter, part...

Between 2011 and 2014, poet and artist Gregory O'Brien found himself following the migratory routes of whales and seabirds across vast tracts of the South Pacific Ocean, resulting in work that O'Brien describes as `acts of devotion - a homage to a series...

RABBIT RABBIT Kerrin P. Sharpe he gave him the lungs to open the hands of fields and walk through an alphabet of rabbits -'the train kept my son breathing' In her third collection, Kerrin P. Sharpe writes about trespass and return, the homelessness of...

In his debut poetry collection Bill Nelson steps into John Coltrane's body and wears it around. He is a turtle disappearing into the sea. He plumbs the depths of business jargon. He takes singing lessons in Berhampore. He takes his grandfather roller...

Michele Leggott's new book of poetry follows on from her 2009 collection, Mirabile Dictu, in its exploration of light and of gathering dark. Leggott is a poet of the lilting, shining moment and in five of the sections here we follow her through her own...

From Shakespeare's sonnets to Japanese Haikus, we all know that poetry is the literature of love. But do the poets have lustier moments? Do they ever think about sex? In this collection, New Zealand's most well loved poets give a great grunt in the...

This collection extends the themes of the poet’s acclaimed debut. The poems represent acts of love for something known or something dreamed about and reflect the obsessions of the poet.Book InformationISBN 9780864734365Author Rachel BushFormat...

Rich in the themes and preoccupations that have made this author's novels so admired, this fine collection of poetry provides wise, elegiac poems on love and loss, affectionate poems about the New Zealand countryside, and witty poems about human frailty...

This vivacious collection of poetry charts the author's experience with the sometimes painful intersection of New Zealand and Samoan cultures in her life. Alive with the energy and rhythm of performance poetry and oral traditions, these poems reshape...

Everything Talks (2008), Sam Sampson's first collection of poetry, won Best First Poetry Book at the New Zealand Book Awards in 2009. Halcyon Ghosts, his second collection, continues an experimental exploration of language and- bookended as it is between...

Twelve months of a laureate: in 2008 Michele Leggott wrote a poem a week to record her term as the inaugural New Zealand Poet Laureate. In her new collection of poems Mirabile Dictu ('mi.rah.buh.lay dik.tu' - Wonderful to relate; amazing to say), she...

Gregory O'Brien's first collection of poems since Afternoon of an Evening Train (2005), Beauties of the Octagonal Pool is centred on the 'octagonal pool' of the Waitemata Harbour. In an eight-armed embrace, Beauties of the Octagonal Pool collects poems...

Eight years after her last, prize-winning, collection with AUP, ""The Lark Quartet"", this is a new book of poems from a major poet. It is full of the stuff of daily life, fizzing with personalities, alive with incidents and...

In Anna Jackson's fifth collection of poetry, Thicket, a rich and leafy life is closing in on the poet. `These are our thicket days', she writes, `and it does seem darker, / though the sun is at its peak / over the crown of leaves.' But a thicket is also...

The poems in The Glass Rooster explore the spaces inhabited by humans and other creatures - not just natural ecosystems like deserts or the alpine zone, but cities and outer space. Our guide on this journey is a glass rooster - observer of stars and...

Dear Sweet Harry is Lynn Jenner's first collection - the autobiography of an obsession linking the author's own family history with that of two famous deceivers, Harry Houdini and Mata Hari. In an act of imaginative will Jenner assembles 'factions' and...

This new collection by Albert Wendt moves from the warm valley winds of Hawai`i to the seasons of a garden in Auckland, New Zealand. From Manoa to a Ponsonby Garden is a collection of poignant, extraordinary poems - alert and self-confident, challenging...

The Black River collects C K Stead's most recent poems, written over the last eighteen months. The brilliant and moving focus of the collection is its final sequence, written after Stead suffered a stroke which temporarily affected his ability to read...

This fourth in AUP's New Poets series includes three very different voices. Chris Tse's work draws fascinatingly on his family history and Chinese heritage. His selection, "Sing Joe", includes narrative poems about his great-grandparents'...

An aloe - spiky, soothing, fragrant, bitter - opens Diana Bridge's new collection of poetry. Aloe is structured in four parts: 'The compulsion to catch it', 'Into words', 'Among the Freuds' and 'It's their century'. The first section looks outwards to...

A wind that only the widest gardens can hold. A lipstick stain on a poem. A bee released - with recourse to a letter from the Inland Revenue Department. A grey sky like a governess, a mother dressed by her two-year-old son, a flurry of leaves behind a...

Mister Hamilton, John Dickson's first collection in eighteen years, is an appealing, questioning mix of elements. Over a base of South Island bedrock (granite, schist, greywacke), Dickson has peopled this quietly fiery collection with day-to-day working...

If `mother won't come to us', New Zealanders must go to mother . . . Here an expat poet finds herself in alien yet strangely familiar territory, a place her ancestors `got off'. What must she do to survive? Score herself a bedsit, work in a pub, hunt up...

Woven from the sharp and tensile strands of memory, many of the poems in this collection return to the primal pains of neglect and damage in childhood. Emotional memory is anchored in the specific detail of an era - the selection is laced with dreams of...

Walls to Kick and Hills to Sing From: A Comedy with Interruptions is a new poetry collection from Murray Edmond. Arranged in six acts, 'Exposition', 'Complication', 'Revelation', 'Peripety', 'Catastrophe' and 'Denouement', it merrily experiments with...

Hot on the heels of Being Here, O'Sullivan's capacious selected poems, which many chose as one of the poetry highlights of the year, comes a collection of 75 new poems. They show a mature poet, full of experience, still with the capacity to dazzle.Book...