Luke Elliott and Claudia Marsden have fallen in love at a perilous time. The Second World War is raging in the Pacific, barbed wire and gun emplacements are strung along the northern beaches in preparation for invasion. As the war moves closer, their 'sextet' of loyal school friends is splintering as individual career dreams are pursued. Luke yearns to be a journalist but a start in newspapers is proving challenging. The war's end unexpectedly provides...

Composed during Covid-19, these poems reveal the fragility of life and the strength of love in dark times. The poet finds solace in the little things of life: a cup of coffee with a friend, a walk by the seashore with her family, in the quiet loveliness of the natural environment, in the dailiness of living even as death seems around the corner. The poems recall the poet's life and memories of loved ones from Suva, Canberra and Delhi, places in the...

'Alex Hand makes the ordinary extraordinary in his latest collection penned during the pandemic. He says himself in "Self-portrait", "I find beauty in polished floorboards, and in our Brown Betty teapot." With an unusual abundance of time in lockdown, who hasn't found themself back in childhood with seemingly infinite time to contemplate a world now shrunk to the backyard and life's past chapters? An ache of time to contemplate the world's current...

'Ecce Homo!' His challenge echoes down the centuries, 'Behold the Man!' How will nine painters, each with their own particular style, culture, attitudes and ambitions relate to the challenge? However, they react, Ecce Homo will relate to each individually. A painter may accept, reject, try to avoid, or argue with Him. The reaction of a devout painter, like El Greco may be predictable, but how about an argumentative Michelangelo, or introspective Rembrandt;...

Once described by Andrew Sant as a 'great talent', Andrys Onsman writes from a migrant's perspective, both joyfully engaged and warily observant. His poetry, plays, essays and translations often focus on how relationships between people and ideas shape the way in which they construct their world. In this collection of poems, Andrys considers how we continually recreate our identities through our relationships with the people, places and ideas we love...

Responses to poems in Figure in the Landscape - Dirk Kruithof, commenting on the poems about art/artists and music/musicians 'Danny's poems are compellingly enjoyable. (I've just raced through those, have you got any more?) They are human, perceptive and idiosyncratic - he's not afraid to cut through the lazy conventions of thought.' George Clark, responding to the sequence 'Spain, Are you Here (early 1980s)' 'There is so much poetry in Spanish history!...

This superb collection of poems shows the benefit of ten years gestation. The major part of the book consists of poems coming from years spent living and studying overseas and then settling back in New Zealand and starting a family. With its broad scope and variety of lyric styles, Mapping the Distance is a landmark book.

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We are all poets; each of us is writing a poem we call a life. Poets who write in words are different only in that they take time out to share with others the shifts in awareness that occur as we pay deep attention to our ongoing experience and struggle to wrest new meaning and wisdom from the chaos of everyday life. Reading poems can create similar shifts of awareness, bringing insights into how life can be understood more profoundly and lived more...

Adventurous, curious and moving, Christie's work braves abstraction and socio-political insights. After Luce Cannon (Titus Books, 2007) and The Facts of Light (Vagabond Press, 2014), Carbon Shapes and Dark Matter is Christie's third collection of poetry. Time after time lines come into focus, excoriating and yet lyrically beautiful. - Jack Ross 'Stephanie Christie releases poetry until the "mind is out of its debt." Political, vulnerable, arresting...