His entry begins:Leafing the other day through the anthology Twenty Contemporary New Zealand Poets (edited by Andrew Johnston and Robyn Marsack), I was reminded just how remarkable is the poetry of Jenny Bornholdt. Her own most recent book is The Rocky Shore, made up of six long poems that are both ambitious and modest in their reach. Like Frank O'Hara she is an "I do this, I do that" poet - but the place where she registers the details of daily life is not Manhattan but a conventional suburban household subject to familiar extremes. On the one hand, we witness the death of a parent and a damaging illness; on the other, there are a range of small, redemptive domestic pleasures centred on family, garden, books. Bornholdt is one of the world's best kept poetry secrets, and her work makes you...[read on]
Bill Manhire has won several New Zealand Book Awards, a number of significant fellowships, and he was the 1997/1998 New Zealand Te Mata Estate Poet Laureate.Manhire was also honored with the 2007 Prime Minister's Award for Literary Achievement. He is the director of the International Institute of Modern Letters, Centre for Creative Writing at Victoria University of Wellington. Manhire has coordinated several bestselling anthologies, and his poetry and fiction is published in New Zealand, the UK, and the USA.
Poems by Bill Manhire available online include "Love Poem," "Wulf," "The Polar Explorer's Love Song," "Death of a Poet," and "Hotel Emergencies."
Writers Read: Bill Manhire.
--Marshal Zeringue
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