Mr Clean & the Junkie / Native Bird / Bones in the Octagon

Description

Mr Clean and The Junkie is a 70s love story which begins at a Sydney casino and ends in a remote river valley in northern New Zealand. An Elvis Costello lookalike and the son of a local crime boss, Jon is weighed down with the burden of his filial responsibilities. But on his way to the casino to launder a briefcase of his father's cash, he catches sight of the dark beauty of gambling junkie, Justine. With her on his arm, pursued by his father's hitmen and a relentless 70s soundtrack, Jon finds the strength to fight back against a life that's lost its shine. But it's not just up to him - somewhere there's a director with a camera rolling, and then the poet herself steps in as a sceptical narrator with a vested interest in her star-cross'd lovers. A startling and original work from a poet who's won awards both sides of the Tasman. In Native bird, Bryan Walpert - who arrived here from the United States a decade ago - writes of what it's been like to be an observer or 'birdwatcher' in a land whose physical and cultural geographies he is still learning to name. With precision and insight, he weaves meditations on birds with the demands of family life in semi-rural, wind-charged Manawatu. At the shifting borders between homes and hearts, prose and poetry, call and song - the poet summons what it means to adapt to new landscapes in an arresting collection that speaks to us all. Carolyn McCurdie hails from the deep south and her poems are made at the hem of a mother's checked tablecloth, the rim of a rain-starved garden and the raw edges of a southern landscape where the elements collide with myth. She pulls on her boots to go out into the world and write of it - acute observation of what she finds combines with her feeling that in the places of heat and light where people gather, there is magic. Compassionate and subversive, these poems speak of a wild world where rules are made to be broken and spiderwebs are made to be kept, and women with foreheads 'like untidy knitting' dance with holy exuberance. A long-awaited first collection.

Jennifer Compton is an award-winning poet, playwright and fiction writer who was brought up in Wellington, emigrated to Australia in the 1970s and lives now in Melbourne. Jennifer has published poetry collections in both countries, winning Australia's Newcastle and Robert Harris poetry prizes, and New Zealand's Kathleen Grattan Award for poetry and Katherine Mansfield Award for short fiction. She has also been awarded a number of international writer residencies. Kathleen Grattan judge, Vincent O'Sullivan says Jennifer's collection This City 'sustains a questing, warmly sceptical mind's engagement with wherever it is, whatever it takes in, and carries the constant drive to say it right'. Bryan Walpert has published poetry, fiction and essays in New Zealand, Australia, the UK, Canada, and widely in his native United States. His work has received the James Wright Poetry Award from the Mid-American Review, first prize in the NZ Poetry Society International Poetry Competition, the Manhire Prize in Creative Science Writing for fiction and a Dialogica award in essay writing from Australia. He has also been a finalist in the Stephen F Austin State University Press Award, the Rattle Poetry Prize and the Montreal Poetry Prize. He teaches creative writing at Massey University in Palmerston North. This is his third collection. 'Walpert has a natural narrative voice that works through lovingly observed overlapping images, gently pulling the reader into a shared, spiritually rewarding journey. One could not ask for more of poetry.' Roald Hoffmann, Nobel-winning chemist and poet. Carolyn McCurdie is a Dunedin writer with many strings to her bow. Winner of the NZ Poetry Society's International Poetry Competition and the Lilian Ida Smith Award, she is a long-time contributor to New Zealand's leading poetry journals, and has published an ebook of short stories and a children's fantasy novel. Carolyn is a member of the Octagon Poets Collective and helps to organise live poetry events in Dunedin. 'Right there in a place where words so frequently stop, Carolyn's lines are memorable.' Paula Green