Bøker av Michele Leggott

Mezzaluna gathers poems from all nine of Michele Leggott's prior books. In complex lyrics, sampling thought and song, voice and vision, Leggott creates lush textured soundscapes. Her poetry covers a wide rage of topics rich in details of her New Zealand life, full of history and family, lights and mirrors, the real and the surreal.

Michele Leggott's new book of poetry follows on from her 2009 collection, Mirabile Dictu, in its exploration of light and of gathering dark. Leggott is a poet of the lilting, shining moment and the sections here follow some of her own moments and movements, experiments and experiences - to Devonport, to Australia, to the north - as well as reverberating with the stories and histories of others. The book's final two sections take this exploration of character and narrative further as in one we see off a soldier - shadowed by Leggott - to the First World War; and in the other - set in an earlier, unspecified time charted for us by telegraphic weather reports - a family tragedy unfolds, until a body is finally brought home for burial. With her 'dear shapes gone to sound', Leggott's textured poem-scapes are more aurally charged than ever, like a 'piano in a dark room that is / quite what it is like and never the same'. A splendid, immersive collection of poetry, Heartland is also, Leggott says, 'a destination and a song, a shadow and a single word with two chambers'.

In 2008 Michele Leggott wrote a poem a week to record her term as the inaugural New Zealand Poet Laureate. In her collection of poems Mirabile Dictu (amazing to say), she relates the wonders of those 12 months, which took her to Matahiwi Marae in Hawke's Bay to receive her brilliant sky-blue, specially carved tokotoko, Te Kikorangi; through a time of mourning for and celebration of former poet laureate Hone Tuwhare; to Florence, across a 'poetic bridge'; and to Wellington 'hand to hand' with four other laureates. With her is Te Kikorangi as guide and companion - 'almost as good as the blue from Kapiti / we eat when the good times roll'. Leggott also delves back into the past, layering poems of today with poems of then - and finds, among others, Isabella - growing up in a colonial town, 'named for a grandmother over the sea'. The poems in Mirabile Dictu are gifts; they are lush and supple; they glory in language; they go 'looking for a good time' and find rose cuttings, great-aunts, an elephant, several feasts, adorations and assumptions - 'the breathing world'. Through the poems Leggott explores languages within languages, hearing and seeing, coming and going, the porousness of experience and its representations. In this collection she is a daily traveller, crafter of words and maker of fire.

Protest and revolution, beads and flowers, love not war: this anthology evokes an era and uncovers a period of creativity and talent. Organized chronologically, it foregrounds poems, not poets and includes essays by Brunton and Edmond.