Born Sacred
£13.46
Letter to 'Oumuamua
£13.00
In this wry and witty collection -- addressed to the first interstellar object ever to be detected in our solar system -- James Norcliffe applies a cool, clear eye to human life on Earth. Our foibles and absurdities are laid bare, but so too is the human capacity for love, desire, sorrow and regret. Norcliffe's succinct observations traverse the personal and the political. Grounded in the local but encompassing the global, they range through subjects such as commuting, insomnia and faltering health to the contemplation of current events and issues such as gun violence and climate change. The landscapes and settings of these poems are vividly evoked, often in terms of human impact. Birds, 'knowing what we are', take flight at the approach of a person; a coal range is the acknowledged centre of a West Coast family's survival. Often very funny, and always deeply felt, Norcliffe's Letter to 'Oumuamua describes a world where every day is both everyday gritty, material, bread-and-butter and also luminous and precious: a 'day like no other'.
James Norcliffe is a poet, childrens writer and editor. He has published 11 collections of poetry and 14 novels for young people. His first adult novel, The Frog Prince (RHNZ Vintage), was published in 2022 and his most recent poetry collection, Deadpan (Otago University Press), was published in 2019. He has co-edited major collections of poetry and short fiction, including Essential New Zealand Poems: Facing the Empty Page (RHNZ, 2014), Leaving the Red Zone (Clerestory Press, 2016), Bonsai: Best small stories from Aotearoa New Zealand (Canterbury University Press, 2018) and Ko Aotearo Tatou: We Are New Zealand (Otago University Press, 2020). He has had a long association with the Canterbury Poets Collective, takahē, the ReDraft annual anthologies of writing by young New Zealanders and, more recently, Flash Frontier.
- ISBN-13
- 9781990048517
- Publisher
- Otago University Press
- Imprint
- Otago University Press (NZ)
- Publication date
- 28 June 2023
- Format
- Paperback
- Pages
- 96
- Dimensions
- 230 x 150 mm
- Language
- English
