Selected Poems

Häftad, Engelska, 2017

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How can language contain the world that spills From its torn rinds, how can my ode hold On to language that ejects itself like birdsong From pine trees still shady with dawn . . . ‘To Mount Victoria’, The Commonplace Odes Ian Wedde has been a major presence in New Zealand poetry since his work began appearing in journals in the late 1960s. His first book of poetry appeared in 1971; his sixth book won the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry in 1978; his sixteenth and most recent was a finalist in 2014. By the mid-1980s, as well as shaping his own verse, he had become an influential critic and shaper of larger trends in poetry as one of the co-editors of The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse (1985) and The Penguin Book of contemporary New Zealand Poetry – Ngā Kupu Tītohu o Aotearoa (1989). After a quiet spell in the mid- to late 1990s came the much celebrated The Commonplace Odes in 2001, in which Wedde offered the Horatian/Keatsian ode as transformative a moment as Baxter had given the sonnet back in 1970. Three excellent books followed, most recently The Lifeguard: Poems 2008–2013, published at the end of his tenure as New Zealand Poet Laureate. While Wedde has constantly experimented with and pushed boundaries of form and influence in his poetry, his work returns often to key themes and ideas, preoccupations and effects that this book throws into brilliant relief: a politics of language, social and ecological relationships, how memory works, the perceptual world. The son Carlos of Earthly: Sonnets for Carlos (1975) is now a father himself; Ian Wedde’s poems are now more likely to feature grandchildren. But the ranging, tenacious, conceptual-romantic poet, with his linguistically rich but intellectually rigorous voice, is the same, and tracing that voice through nearly five decades will be one of the many pleasures readers take from this book.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2017-05-01
Mått164 x 220 x 5 mm
Vikt558 g
FormatHäftad
SpråkEngelska
Antal sidor340
FörlagAuckland University Press
IllustratörReynolds, John
ISBN9781869408596

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Poesi inom Skonlitteratur

Ian Wedde is the author of sixteen collections of poetry, seven novels, two collections of essays, a collection of short stories, a monograph on the artist Bill Culbert, several art catalogues, a memoir, and has been co-editor of two poetry anthologies. His work has been widely anthologised, and has appeared in journals nationally and internationally. Wedde won the New Zealand Book Award for Fiction for his first novel, Dick Seddon’s Great Dive (1976), and a New Zealand Book Award for his poetry collection Spells for Coming Out (1977). He was the Robert Burns Fellow at the University of Otago in 1972, the Victoria University Writing Fellow in 1984, the Katherine Mansfield Fellow in Menton in 2005, and The University of Auckland Michael King Writer in Residence in 2009. In 2010 Wedde was awarded an ONZM in the Queen’s Birthday Honours, and in 2011 was made New Zealand Poet Laureate. He was awarded the Creative New Zealand Writer’s Residency in Berlin in 2013–14, and in 2014 received the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement (poetry). Between 1994 and 2004 Wedde was head of art and visual culture at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa; more recently he has been an adjunct senior lecturer in the departments of art history and English at The University of Auckland and is now an independent curator and critic.

Even without being mindful of the prizes and accolades of Wedde’s career, the poetry speaks for itself. No library of New Zealand poetry is complete without it. Your bookshelf and soul need this. – Andrew Paul Wood, Noted Time does not diminish the power of Wedde. Now in his 70s, this man keeps growing. The results are formidable. There is no preponderance of generalities, cliches and small-picture metaphors. [...] Selected Poems is a real case of an oft-ignored legacy. This book should help Wedde’s reputation grow. – Hamish Wyatt, Otago Daily Times “I’ve always believed that language is a kind of secret agent. Sometimes, in a very methodical way, it will bring back a recall and you’ll be able to write it down in nice, clear articulate prose – but the great thing with poetry is that it has this little edge of anarchy – what you perceive becomes vivid and something else will be triggered by that, and then, who knows?” – Ian Wedde, NZ Herald