Excuse me if I laugh. The roads are dark and large books block our path. The air we breathe is made of evening air. The world is longer than the road that brings us here.
Bill Manhire's new book begins with the song of an extinct bird, the huia, and journeys on i... read more

Hedge through the hedge and way back then pushing my way out into the Central Otago sun there was the laughing face of Jean and someone else whose name I have forgotten they played with me as if I was a doll Bernadette Hall is... read more

A drunken poet obliged to choose between Art and Love. What could possibly go wrong? Rock Oyster Island. It's a slack kind of place, but that's the way the locals like it: lifestyle farmers, pensioned-off bikers, seekers and healers, meth cooks and fis... read more

In this selection of poems covering the period 1972 to 2002. This beautifully elegant volume excludes the cartoon element, focusing on Leunig's brilliant texts, with all their absurdity, hilarity, poignancy and joyfulness. Michael Leunig pokes fun at ... read more

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Is our identity more of a composite than we realise? We often think of ourselves as formed from our core values or our DNA, but in Social Media, Mary Macpherson explores identity as a creation of the interactions we have with others: friends, family and the wider world, and the evolving... read more

I have a growing number of scars. A three-inch horizontal scar across the stomach, very tidy. Two more small ones either side of the rib cage and now one on the hand and arm to deal with a Viking inheritance. I look at them in the mirror. I hope they don't fade away comp... read more

In her latest poetry collection How I Get Ready, Ashleigh Young fails to learn to drive, vanishes from the fossil record, and finally finishes writing a book.
An Ashleigh Young poem is a world: hospitable, strange, a little off kilter. The poems in How I Get Ready bristle with ... read more

This book is the first to represent the full extent of Brian Turner's achievement as a poet, from his Commonwealth Poetry Prize-winning debut, Ladders of Rain, to poems written in 2018. One of New Zealand's most acclaimed and widely read contemporary poets, Turner is a p... read more

As he was turning forty, Walt Whitman wrote twelve poems in a small handmade book he entitled "Live Oak, With Moss." The poems were intensely private reflections on his attraction to and affection for other men. They were also Whitman's most adventurous explorations of the theme o... read more

Description: First performed in 1959, The End of the Golden Weather has become a part of New Zealand history, a touchstone of New Zealand experience. Unable to earn a living as a playwright in a country without a professional theatre, Bruce Mason presented, in fear and tr... read more

Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy returns with Sincerity, her last full collection as Poet Laureate, a magisterial achievement from the greatest living poet of our times. A frank, disarming and deeply moving exploration of loss and remembrance in their many forms, presented in a beautiful, foiled package.