Overview

James Norcliffe, awarded the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Poetry in 2022, is one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s most distinguished and beloved contemporary poets. A Day Like No Other gathers poems from his remarkable  career, which includes eleven collections spanning nearly four decades. Often conversational in tone – talking (it may seem) of you and me – these poems are perceptive and witty. They ring with clarity as they pay witness to the turn of the seasons, environmentally, domestically and politically. Their range of reference is both broad and local, as Norcliffe sweeps his lens through time and space and, with superb control of focus, zooms in and out on the peculiarities of our species and our planet. The ‘here and now’ is vividly present in every poem, and every poem also quietly insists that there is much more to ‘here’ and ‘now’ than is obvious at first glance. To read a Norcliffe poem can be to feel the sun on one’s face and,  simultaneously, a shiver down the spine. A beautifully designed and artfully curated volume, A Day Like No Other is a fine selection of James Norcliffe’s like-no-other poems. It will be read and re-read for generations, and is a must-have for confirmed Norcliffe fans and Norcliffe newbies alike.

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9781991348166

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Reviews

[Norcliffe’s] writing is unsettling, unsentimental, uncanny, haunted by darkness and evil, but still incredibly humane – and it is characterised by precision, full of nimbly deployed rhetorical volte-faces and metaphors you wish you’d thought of. — Erik Kennedy  Norcliffe is indefatigable in showing us both the beauty and fragility of life, often in strikingly beautiful ways. — James Roderick Burns for London Grip  James Norcliffe, recently awarded the 2023 Margaret Mahy Medal, writes with a pen fuelled by the physical world, and a sense of interiority that allows both confession and piquant ideas. His writing is witty, thoughtful, fluid and rich in movement. — Paula Green for NZ Poetry Shelf

Author Information

James Norcliffe is a poet, children’s writer, novelist and editor. He was awarded the 2022 Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Poetry and has published eleven  poetry collections, most recently Letter to ’Oumuamua (Otago University Press, 2023). He is also the author of fourteen novels for young readers, notably the award-winning Loblolly Boy series. His first adult novel, The Frog Prince (RHNZ Vintage), was published in 2022. Norcliffe has a long association with the Canterbury Poets’ Collective, takahē, the ReDraft anthologies and Flash Frontier.

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