New Zealand Poets Take on The World

New Zealand launch of 25 New Zealand Poets on The Poetry Archive UK web project.

The Poetry Archive UK is a foremost poetry website, promoting written and spoken poetry from around the globe. In a new initiative, The Poetry Archive UK is launching Author Pages, including texts and readings by 25 classic, contemporary and emerging New Zealand poets.

Come along and enjoy readings by a selection of poets and editors whose works are being launched on The Poetry Archive UK!

Readers are:
Diana Bridge,
Riemke Ensing,
Anna Jackson,
Professor Mac Jackson (reading poems by Charles Brasch),
Siobhan Harvey and
Alistair Paterson.

Riemke Ensing's collections include Letters (1982), Selected Poems - Talking Pictures (HeadworX, 2000) and O Lucky Man - poems to celebrate the Charles Brasch Centennial (Otakou Press, 2009). Currently she has a poem (Rain) initially printed in Landfall as part of an exhibition of poetry and art, Korero at Uxbridge gallery, a poem in Dear Heart - the most recent Random House anthology of NZ Love Poems, and some new poems to appear in blackmailpress online.

Professor Mac Jackson is Emeritus Professor of English at The University of Auckland. His publications include 12 books as author or editor and over 2000 contributions to books and academic journals. He is also an anthologist, literary historian and critic of New Zealand poetry. For the 25 New Zealand Poets on the Poetry Archive UK project, Mac compiled Charles Brasch's Author's Page and recordings. Today, Mac will read from Brasch's poems on that Author's Page.

Anna Jackson lives in Island Bay, Wellington and lectures at Victoria University. She has published five collections of poetry with Auckland University Press. Her most recent collection, Thicket, published in 2011, is shortlisted for the 2012 New Zealand Book Awards for Poetry.

Diana Bridge holds a PhD in Chinese Literature from the Australian National University. She has published five acclaimed collections with Auckland University Press, the most recent of which is Aloe in 2009.

Alistair Paterson (ONZM) is an esteemed editor, novelist, poet and critic. His poetry collections include Caves in the Hills (Pegasus Press, 1965), Birds Flying (Pegasus, 1973), Odysseus Rex (Auckland University Press, 1986) and Africa, Kabbo, Mantis and the Porcupine's Daughter (Puriri Press, 2008). For the past 3 decades he has edited literary magazines such as Mate, Climate and, presently, Poetry New Zealand.

Siobhan Harvey's first New Zealand collection, Lost Relatives (Steele Roberts, 2011) transported her to the 2011 Ubud Writers Festival in Indonesia, Wellington's Poetry Ballroom and NZ Poetry Society's readings and the 2012 Auckland Writers Festival. When the collection was first published, she was due to launch it in Christchurch, but the quake intervened. Generously, in September the 2012 Press Christchurch Writer's Festival will be supporting the book's return to its author's second home.