Collected Poems Bill Manhire

Description

Title: Collected Poems
Author: Bill Manhire
Publisher: Victoria University Press, Wellington, 2001
Format: Paperback
Condition: Excellent condition. Small sticker mark on front cover

Out of print. Poems 1967–1999.

Description:

Thirty years of one of New Zealand’s most distinctive poetic voices, gathered into a single volume. Collected Poems draws on eight previous collections to trace Bill Manhire’s arc from the compressed, playful lyrics of the 1970s through to the Antarctica sequence of the late 1990s — poems written after Manhire became one of only a handful of poets ever to reach the South Pole.

What makes Manhire’s work so hard to summarise is precisely what makes it so pleasurable to read. His poems are deceptively simple — short lines, ordinary words, unpretentious surfaces — and yet they move in unexpected directions, turning the vernacular Kiwi phrase into something stranger and more resonant than it had any right to be. Stand magazine described it as “the verse equivalent of fusion cooking — a sort of ‘hoosh’ which turns everything that comes to hand into something rich and strange, or simply fresh and appetising.” The word “hoosh” is Manhire’s own — the hot stew carried by Antarctic explorers, and the title of one of his finest poems.

Internationally, Manhire has been published by Carcanet Press in the UK (alongside Les Murray and Edwin Morgan, which says something about the company he keeps), and Michael Hulse of PN Review called him “one of the freshest and most exhilarating poets now working in English.” In New Zealand, Alan Riach of the Sunday Star Times was more direct: “There can be little doubt of Bill Manhire’s stature among contemporary New Zealand poets. He is the best.”

This VUP edition appeared in 2001 — the same year Manhire founded the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University of Wellington, the creative writing programme that has since produced Eleanor Catton, Catherine Chidgey, Tusiata Avia, Ashleigh Young, and much of the rest of contemporary NZ literature. That convergence is not incidental. Manhire has shaped NZ writing from two directions at once: through his own poems, and through the writers he taught.

The cover painting — ‘Bill Manhire rides Phar Lap at Wingatui’ by Gregory O’Brien — is a piece of art in its own right.

Why We Stock It:

This is the essential collected edition of our most significant living poet, from the publisher that has always been his home. It is out of print, not easily found, and belongs on the Literary backbone shelf — alongside Frame, Baxter, and Stead — as a permanent fixture of the Gravy’s stock.