Life & Customs begins and ends in Otago. It circles through places and through history, picking up the rhythms of a maze. It is full of stories: a girl slips into an anorexic silence as cold as Antarctica; lovers wander hand in hand into a southern future. 'The hope thing' emerges as a stubborn possibility.
Author Biography
Bernadette Hall is an award-winning poet who lives in North Canterbury. Her many books include The Merino Princess: Selected Poems (2004), and most recently The Lustre Jug (2009). She is the editor of Like Love Poems: Selected Poems of Joanna Paul (2006) and The Judas Tree: Poems by Lorna Staveley Anker (2013). In 2004, she visited Antarctica as a guest of Antarctica New Zealand; in 2006 she was Victoria University of Wellington's Writer in Residence; and in 2007 she held the Rathcoola Residency in County Cork, Ireland.