'Though dear to my heart is Zealandia, / For
the home of my boyhood I yearn; / I dream, among sunshine and
grandeur, / Of a land that is misty and stern; / From the land
of the moa and the Maori / My thoughts to old Scotia will turn;
/ Thus the Heather is blent with the Kauri / And the Thistle
entwined with the Fern.'
Thus John Liddell Kelly (1850-1926), wishing that his native
country and his new land could be somehow brought together across
the separating seas. Despite the unbelievable changes in communication
since his lifetime, and a constant coming and going between Scotland
and New Zealand, both countries remain ill-informed, generally,
about each other's literatures, especially poetry.
› More about this
selection
The poets
Dinah Hawken
In the first lines of Small Stories of Devotion, Dinah Hawken gives us her 
intention: 'I'll stop shuffling under my New Zealand cool, I'll come out / and tell the stories in an eager childlike way'. She's speaking of that long poem-sequence, ostensibly telling someone else's dreams in a heightened linguistically explorative way which contains both the wonder of children and a poetry of vibrant life -- celebration, but it's true of all her work...
› Dinah Hawken introduced by Gerry Loose
› From The Brain and the Leaf by Dinah Hawken
Bob Orr
A country shaped like a butterfly's wing': where is that? 
you may ask. But it is no use scanning the world's map.
Butterflies' wings come in as many shapes as the countries of the world, and Bob Orr has been there to see them and sing about them...
› Bob Orr introduced by Kapka Kassabova
› A Country Shaped like a Butterfly's Wing by Bob Orr
Anne Kennedy
 Reading Anne Kennedy is not like reading at all. It's like watching a life spin and turn, like a washing machine of words, flipping and sorting and humming with the day to day business of families and children and houses and milk bottles and doctor's appointments and scattered conversations…And love. Always love...
› Anne Kennedy introduced by Kirsty Gunn
› I Am (1) by Anne Kennedy
Glenn Colquhoun
My first encounter with Glenn Colquhoun's poetry was a gift from a New Zealander, my Aunt Fran, in 2003; and the book she gave me was Playing God. They are poems I came to love, not because they call me back to the place of my childhood, or explore a history, or evoke a landscape of tussock or tree ferns...
› Glenn Colquhoun introduced by Gerrie Fellows
› Increasingly sophisticated methods of divination used in the practice of medicine by Glenn Colquhoun Bill Manhire
 'Kevin',
the closing poem from Bill Manhire's collection Lifted,
caught me the moment I read it in December 2007, when I was browsing
in a bookshop in the northland town of Whangarei. I bought the
book on the strength of that poem alone…
› Bill Manhire introduced by
Alan Riach
› Kevin by Bill Manhire
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