Collected Poems
Into the settled poetry of New Zealand a disruptive force rumbled in magazines and then burst forth with "Malady" (1970). Here began the revolution of Bill Manhire. He starts thriftily, with imagistic poems whose calm voices are at odds with the ego-rant of neo-romantic contemporaries. Manhire is drawn to economy, to sparsely-peopled landscapes, the territory of the Norse Sagas (in which he invests serious scholarship) and Antarctica. He sent his publisher a postcard from Antarctica, where he was poet-in-residence: he was making his first day trip to the South Pole.
He generally keeps to stanzas and syntax, but his syntax twists like an Ashberian Mobius strip. As a scholar he is old-fashioned and wants to communicate, making fun of the dialects of literary criticism and theory; he is also an explorer in language who doesn't like to go back to the museum every day but to work in the field. In the briefest moment he establishes his theme (rhythmic, imagistic, syntactical) and immediately starts playing variations.
"Collected Poems" draws on eight previous books.
He generally keeps to stanzas and syntax, but his syntax twists like an Ashberian Mobius strip. As a scholar he is old-fashioned and wants to communicate, making fun of the dialects of literary criticism and theory; he is also an explorer in language who doesn't like to go back to the museum every day but to work in the field. In the briefest moment he establishes his theme (rhythmic, imagistic, syntactical) and immediately starts playing variations.
"Collected Poems" draws on eight previous books.
About the author
Bill Manhire was born in Invercargill in 1946. He was his country's inaugural Poet Laureate and has won the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry four times. He holds a personal chair at the Victoria University of Wellington, where he directs the celebrated creative writing programme and the International Institute of Modern Letters. His volume of short fiction, South Pacific, was published by Carcanet in 1994.
Reviews
"A poet of considerable subtlety and strength, a dangerous writer..." – Charles Causley, Landfall