Overview

Bill Manhire has always subscribed to Paul Valéry’s definition of poetry as ‘a prolonged hesitation between sound and sense’. In that spirit, many of the poems in this new, dazzling collection blend story and song, and do so using everyday words and phrases that – suddenly, on the page – become new and delightfully weird. Lyrical Ballads is a many-peopled collection: the baffled inhabitants of Every Street and Intermediate Street are here, while Dracula, T.S. Eliot and Bobby Outram from Outram have walk-on parts. The collection is anchored by two long sequences that embrace awkwardness, mystery and absurdity: ‘The Tobacco Tin’, a kind of folk story riding along on its own lacunae, and ‘Tell You What’, a set of curmudgeonly opinions that evoke the prejudices of a fast-vanishing world. As they notice the small collisions between wonder and everyday reality, and the trajectories of those who don’t fit easily in this world, these poems close in on the darker certainties of our lives.

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9781800175440

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Reviews

‘Being the leading poet in New Zealand is like being the best DJ in Estonia, impressive enough on its own terms. But Bill Manhire is more than that: he’s unquestionably world-class. As with Seamus Heaney, you get a sense of someone with a steady hand on the tiller, and both the will and the craft to take your breath away.’ Teju Cole, Boston Globe 'I cannot recommend Lyrical Ballads enough.' Claire Mabey, The Spinoff

Author Information

Bill Manhire was born in Invercargill, New Zealand, in 1946. He was his country’s inaugural Poet Laureate and has won the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry four times. He headed the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University of Wellington, establishing and directing the university’s prestigious creative writing programme. His volume of short fiction, South Pacific, was published by Carcanet in 1994. His poetry collections include Lifted (2007), and his Collected Poems (2001) and Selected Poems (2014). In 2018, he was made one of the Arts Foundation Icon Artists, an award given to only twenty living artists for their lifetime achievement and contribution to the arts in New Zealand.

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