Fire-Penny: Poems by

Description

Snapshot reconstructions of life on Scotland's remote St Kilda island - ancestral home of McQueens - open this tenth collection of poetry from Cilla McQueen. The spare life in this place of birds and sea and weather leads into a new set of poems from the poet's Bluff home, quiet observations on friends and animals, memories and dreams, and weather. Many of the reflective poems are conversational in style; one poem is written in the form of a play, and another appears at first to be a dictionary definition. Even the simplest of topics, such as eating cake or meeting a newborn baby, are taken by McQueen and transformed into thoughtful works. The collection closes with a section entitled A Widow's Songs, in which the poet mourns her late partner.

Cilla McQueen was the New Zealand Poet Laureate 200911. She has published 14 volumes of poetry and has won the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry three times. Her work has been extensively anthologised. Cilla's most recent publication was Edwin's Egg and other poetic novellas (OUP, 2014).