From Manoa to a Ponsonby Garden

Description

This new collection by Albert Wendt moves from the warm valley winds of Hawai'i to the seasons of a garden in Auckland. From Manoa to a Ponsonby Garden is a collection of poignant, extraordinary poems - alert and self-confident, challenging of literary conventions, rough-hewn yet imbued with compelling vitalism - by one of our most celebrated writers. Writing, family and the passing of time are constant preoccupations. Opening in Hawai'i, Wendt watches the changing shadows of the mountains from his verandah; considers the nature of mauli, the seat of life; walks protected in his wife's perfumed slipstream to work; and writes to Hone Tuwhare. In the second half, his Ponsonby garden provides the setting and vivid detail for 38 'garden' poems, interspersed with inky, drawn works. If hips need replacing, poets grow older, tsunami destroy and friends slip away, still a spirit of renewal pervades this collection.

Maualaivao Albert Wendt CNZM is an esteemed writer who has been an influential figure in the development of New Zealand and Pacific writing since the 1970s. His verse novel The Adventures of Vela won the Commonwealth Writers' regional prize and his co-edited anthology Whetu Moana won the Montana NZ Book Award for Reference & Anthology.

The act of making a poem can be described as that of making the imaginative visible and heard. In Albert Wendt s latest work, "The Book of the Black Star," this becomes doubly so as the poet combines his usual word-smithing with graphic mark-making. Shonagh Lindsay, "New Zealand Herald" on "The Book of the Black Star""