Selected Poems – Jenny Bornholdt

Description

Title: Selected Poems
Author: Jenny Bornholdt MNZM
Publisher: Victoria University Press, Wellington, 2016
Format: Hardback
Condition: Excellent

Description:

The mushrooms on the cover have been torn up by the roots. Someone has laid them carefully on paper towels. The dirt is still fresh. Beneath them, barely visible, a woman’s dark-haired head. This is a cover designed to tell you exactly what kind of poetry is inside: domestic, precise, and slightly more strange than it first appears.

Selected Poems collects Jenny Bornholdt’s work across nine volumes and nearly thirty years — from This Big Face in 1988 through to The Rocky Shore (which won the Montana NZ Book Award for Poetry in 2009) and beyond. It includes the beloved short poems — “How to get ahead of yourself while the light still shines”, “Being a Poet” — alongside vernacular anecdotes and the extended sequences that mark her longer poems. It is the authoritative document of a career.

Bornholdt was New Zealand’s Poet Laureate from 2005 to 2007. She was appointed a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2014 for services as a poet. Victoria University Press describes her as “the major New Zealand poet of her generation.” The Stuff reviewer said her poems are marked by “understatement, quietness, and a mesmerising contemplation of the world — as if she holds her hand up to pause daily activity and allow us to see with restored attention.” Read NZ says her poems “ring like the reassuring chime of crystal glass.”

This is the hardback edition, published by VUP in 2016. The ribbon bookmark is still there.

Why We Stock It:

The selected works of NZ’s Poet Laureate — a career-long document of the most consistently praised NZ poet of her generation, who has spent thirty years looking at mushrooms and broccoli and envelopes sent from Fielding in 1971 and finding in them something that rings true and lasts.