Milk and Honey by Rupi Kaur

$30.00 NZD

Category: Poetry / Plays | Reading Level: very good

A hardcover gift edition of Milk and Honey, the #1 New York Times bestselling poetry and prose collection by Rupi Kaur, which has sold over 3 million copies worldwide. Milk and Honey is a collection of poetry and prose about survival. About the experience of violence, abuse, love, loss, and femininity. This clothbound edition features deckled edge paper, a woven ribbon marker, and a foreword written by the author.  The book is divided into four chapters, and each chapter serves a different purpose. Deals with a different pain. Heals a different heartache. Milk and Honey takes readers through a journey of the most bitter moments in life and finds sweetness in them because there is sweetness everywhere if you are just willing to look. ...Show more

Selected Poems by Ian Wedde; John Reynolds (Illustrator)

$40.00 NZD

Category: Poetry / Plays

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 - Nga Kupu Titohu o Aotearoa (1989). ...Show more

Milk and Honey (Clothback Gift edition) by Rupi Kaur

$33.00 NZD

Category: Poetry / Plays

This clothbound edition features deckled edge paper, a woven ribbon marker, and a foreword written by the author. The book is divided into four chapters, and each chapter serves a different purpose. Deals with a different pain. Heals a different heartache. Milk and Honey takes readers through a journey of the most bitter moments in life and finds sweetness in them because there is sweetness everywhere if you are just willing to look. ...Show more

Tightrope by Selina Tusitala Marsh

$29.00 NZD

Category: Poetry / Plays | Reading Level: Very Good

Built around the abyss, the tightrope, and the trick that we all have to perform to walk across it, Pasifika poetry warrior Selina Tusitala Marsh brings to life in Tightrope her ongoing dialogue with memory, life and death to find out whether 'stories' really can 'cure the incurable'. In Marsh's poetry, sharp intelligence combines a focused warrior fierceness with perceptive humour and energy, upheld by the mana of the Pacific. ...Show more

Penguin's Poems for Weddings by Laura Barber (ed.)

$26.00 NZD

Category: Poetry / Plays | Reading Level: very good

Now in paperback, a wonderful anthology of wedding poems, filled with surprising, curious, unorthodox and charming poems about love and the public commitment to love. For the many thousands of readers who each year go through the complex mix of thrill and trauma that is the planning of a marriage ceremo ny, Laura Barber's anthology is the answer to a prayer, with a wonderfully generous and unusual selection of poems suitable for reading out loud, and which celebrate and encapsulate our deepest feelings in all their bewildering diversity. Including verse by poets ranging from John Keats to Carol Ann Duffy and Walt Whitman to W. H. Auden, as well as many less familiar voices, this anthology offers numerous options for anyone about to read at the wedding of family or friends, or to celebrate their own. ...Show more

How to be Dead in a Year of Snakes by Chris Tse

$25.00 NZD

Category: Poetry / Plays | Reading Level: Very Good

In 1905, white supremacist Lionel Terry murdered the Cantonese gold prospector Joe Kum Yung to draw attention to his crusade to rid New Zealand of Chinese and other East Asian immigrants. Chris Tse uses this story - and its reenactment for a documentary a hundred years later - to reflect on the experien ces of Chinese migrants of the period, their wishes and hopes, their estrangement and alienation, their ghostly reverberation through a white-majority culture. Along the way we visit the gold fields of the south, a shipwreck in the Hokianga that left the spirits of 500 Chinese goldminers in an unmemorialised limbo for a hundred years and the streets of Newtown, Wellington, where Lionel Terry went out one night 'looking for a Chinaman'. Chris Tse's flickering use of imagery, resonant language and flexible pronouns are particularly suited to the historic events he describes and the viewpoints he shifts through. How to be Dead in a Year of Snakes is a welcome poetic addition to New Zealand literature. ...Show more

Cat Poems by Various

$19.00 NZD

Category: Poetry / Plays

You Know How a Cat will bring a mouse it has caught and lay it at your feet so each morning I bring you a poem that I've written when I woke up in the night as my tribute to your beauty &a promise of my love.-James Laughlin Across the ages, cats have provided their adopted humans with companionship , affection, mystery, and innumerable metaphors. Cats raise a mirror up to their beholders; cats endlessly captivate and hypnotise, frustrate and delight. To poets, in particular, these enigmatic creatures are the most delightful and beguiling of muses, as they purr, prowl, hunt, play, meow, and nap, often oblivious to their so-called masters. Cat Poems offers a litter of odes to our beloved felines by some of the greatest poets of all time. ...Show more

Frost Fair by Carol Ann Duffy; David de las Heras (Illustrator)

$20.00 NZD

Category: Poetry / Plays

The tenth and final Christmas book, set in the frost fairs on London's Thames in the 16th-century, from UK Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy. Beautifully illustrated and produced in a gorgeous small format, this is an irresistible festive gift and Christmas stocking must-have for poetry lovers.

The Fire of Joy: Roughly 80 Poems to Get by Heart and Say Aloud by Clive James

$40.00 NZD

Category: Poetry / Plays

Essentially, this is Clive James' desert island poems: a selection of his favourite verse and a personal commentary on each. The Fire of Joy was the final book Clive James completed before his death in 2019. It takes its title from the French expression Feu de Joie, which refers to a military celebrati on when all the riflemen of a regiment fire one shot after another in a wave of continuous sound: it is a reminder that the regiment’s collective power relies on the individual, and vice versa. In this book, James has chosen a succession of English poems, exploding in sequence from Chaucer to the present day; they tell the story of someone writing something wonderful, and someone else coming along, reading it, and feeling impelled to write something even more wonderful. After a lifetime, these are the poems James found so good that he remembered them despite himself. In offering them to you, the main purpose of this book is to provide ammunition that will satisfy your urge to discover, learn and declaim verse. As well as his selection of poems, James offers a commentary on each: whether this is a biographical, historical or critical introduction to the poem, or a more personal anecdote about the role a particular poem has played in James’s life, these mini essays provide the joy of James’s enthusiasm and the benefit of his knowledge. Full of the flashing fires of poems you will not be able to forget, this book will ignite your passion and leave you with a contagious crackle rattling in your ears. ...Show more

A Nature Poem for Every Night of the Year by Jane McMorland Hunter

$37.00 NZD

Category: Poetry / Plays

Relax and unwind at the end of the day with this calming collection of nature poems--one for each night of the year.   Now more than ever we need something to comfort and distract us from the cares of everyday life. Keep this beautiful book by your bedside and enjoy a dreamy stroll through the natura l world and its wonders every evening, just before you go to sleep. All the great time-honored poets are here--William Wordsworth, John Keats, Emily Dickinson, Robert Bridges--along with some newer and lesser-known voices. The verses reflect and celebrate the changing seasons: read Emily Bront on bluebells in spring and Edward Thomas's evocative "Adlestrop" in summer, and then experience golden autumn with Hartley Coleridge and visit John Clare's "Copse in Winter." Stunningly illustrated with seasonal scenes, this wonderful anthology will delight you for years to come. ...Show more

Heartland by Michele Leggott

$28.00 NZD

Category: Poetry / Plays

I stood in the dark with many others, some of them close enough to touch, some further away. One by one they turned, light fell on faces that were at once strange and familiar, and they began to speak or sing. Soon the riot of their voices was everywhere, the plane of memory tilted at 36,000 feet, fract als caught in the blink of an eye, the clearing of a throat. Heart us invisibly they said, and I saw the land waiting to invent its people. We walk into the clearing, we wait for light to saturate the eye, we remember. 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 the sections here follow some of her own moments and movements, experiments and experiences – to Devonport, to Australia, to the north – as well as reverberating with the stories and histories of others. The book’s final two sections take this exploration of character and narrative further as in one we see off a soldier – shadowed by Leggott – to the First World War; and in the other – set in an earlier, unspecified time charted for us by telegraphic weather reports – a family tragedy unfolds, until a body is finally brought home for burial. With her ‘dear shapes gone to sound’, Leggott’s textured poem-scapes are more aurally charged than ever, like a ‘piano in a dark room that is / quite what it is like and never the same’. A splendid, immersive collection of poetry, Heartland is also, Leggott says, ‘a destination and a song, a shadow and a single word with two chambers’. ...Show more

Say It Naked

$25.00 NZD

Category: Poetry / Plays