This City: poems

Description

Born in New Zealand, resident in Australia, with literary achievements in both countries, Jennifer Compton is a truly trans-Tasman writer. Two recent residencies in New Zealand, at the Randell Cottage in 2008 and as Visiting Literary Artist at Massey University in 2010, have enabled her to spend time in her home city of Wellington, find out new things about her homeland, examine her roots and reflect on life. Two previous residencies in Italy, at the Whiting Library Studio in Rome 2006 and the Ligurian Study Centre, Bogliasco 2007, produced another kind of reflection on time and place, leading Kathleen Grattan Award judge Vincent O'Sullivan to comment about this collection: 'It is a volume that 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. This is a complete book of poetry, coherent, gathering its parts to arrive at a cast of mind, a distinctive voice, far more than simply adding one good poem to another.'

Jennifer Compton was born in Wellington in 1949. Between the early 1970s and '80s she worked as a playwright in both Australia and New Zealand, with productions on radio and in theatre in both countries. She has written and had produced or published many stage and radio plays and short stories and essays. Her stage play, The Big Picture, which premiered at the Griffin Theatre in Sydney in 1997, was published by Currency Press and also produced in Wellington by Circa and Perth by the Perth Theatre Company. She has won several Australian awards for poetry and has been an invited writer at literary festivals in Australia and internationally.