• Show all Categories
  • Literature
    • General
    • Poetry
  • About Us
  • New Releases / Backlists
  • Booksellers & Links
  • News / Events
  • Media / Publicity
  • Publishers
  • Contact
  • Blog
  • Therapies
  •    Login/Sign up
  • Login/Sign up

John Reed Books

Start typing to search by keyword, title, author or ISBN
Searching...
Going to product page...
  • About Us
  • New Releases / Backlists
  • Booksellers & Links
  • News / Events
  • Media / Publicity
  • Publishers
  • Contact
  • Blog
  • Therapies
  1. Literature
  2. Poetry

Browse by category

  • Show all Categories
  • Literature
    • General
    • Poetry

Literature > Poetry

Large 9781776564095

The Savage Coloniser Book by Tusiata Avia

$27.95 AUD

Available Stock:
21

Category: Poetry

Kneel like a prayer full of lynching This is my God-given white ‘Savage is as savage does. And we’re all implicated. Avia breaks the colonial lens wide open. We peer through its poetic shards and see a savage world – outside, inside. With characteristic savage and stylish wit, Avia holds the word-blad e to our necks and presses with a relentless grace. At the end, you’ll feel your pulse anew.’ —Selina Tusitala Marsh, New Zealand Poet Laureate 2017–19  The voices of Tusiata Avia are infinite. She ranges from vulnerable to forbidding to celebratory with forms including pantoums, prayers and invocations. And in this electrifying new work, she gathers all the power of her voice to speak directly into histories of violence. Avia addresses James Cook in fury. She unravels the 2019 Christchurch massacre, walking us back to the beginning. She describes the contortions we make to avoid blame. And she locates the many voices that offer hope. The Savage Coloniser Book is a personal and political reckoning. As it holds history accountable, it rises in power.  'A welcome autopsy of colonisers in past and present times, penned with a scalpel's precision, the inspection of parts, minced down to the floor. Sit in your blood-splattered apron and feel as the verdict is read.' —Ali Cobby Eckermann ‘Tusiata Avia’s poetry . . . is a full-body plunge in winter seas. It’s breathtaking, skin tingling and teeth rattling. I feel alive. It’s as real to me as a salt-crested wave smashing me full in the face until I am nothing but that moment . . . Exhilaration, pain, vulnerability, joy, cheeky confidence and acknowledgement. But what I don’t feel is lonely.’ —Nafanua Kersel, The Hook ...Show more

Add to Cart Click & Collect Add to Wishlist
Large bernadettejacket

Fancy Dancing: New and Selected Poems 2007-2020 by Bernadette Hall

$32.95 AUD

Available Stock:
9

Category: Poetry

Hedge through the hedge and way back then pushing my way out into the Central Otago sun there was the laughing face of Jean and someone else whose name I have forgotten they played with me as if I was a doll Bernadette Hall is Otago born and bred. Following a long and much enjoyed career as a high schoo l teacher in Dunedin and Christchurch, she has for the last eighteen years lived in a renovated bach at Amberley Beach in the Hurunui, North Canterbury, where she has built up a beautiful garden. Fancy Dancing is her eleventh collection of poetry. ‘It's as close as I'll ever get to writing an autobiography,' she says, laughing. And as for the wilful sonnets that explode in the final pages of this book, she wonders where on earth they came from. ‘It was such fun writing them,' she says, ‘as if I‘d kicked down the stable doors and taken to the hills.' In 2015 she collaborated with Robyn Webster on Matakaea, Shag Point, an art /text installation exhibited at the Ashburton Art Gallery. In the same year she was awarded the Prime Minister's Award for literary achievement in poetry. In 2017 she was made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to literature in Aotearoa New Zealand. ...Show more

Add to Cart Click & Collect Add to Wishlist
Large escape path lighting front cover

Escape Path Lighting by John Newton

$32.95 AUD

Available Stock:
15

Category: Poetry | Reading Level: near fine

A drunken poet obliged to choose between Art and Love. What could possibly go wrong? Rock Oyster Island. It's a slack kind of place, but that's the way the locals like it: lifestyle farmers, pensioned-off bikers, seekers and healers, meth cooks and fishing guides. It's only a ferry ride to the city but the modern world feels blessedly remote. Working hard is not greatly valued. Mild Pacific sunshine pours down unfailingly. When Arthur Bardruin, fugitive poet, washes up on Marigold Ingle's beach, he dares to hope he may be safe from the gaze of the Continence Police. With Marigold and her parrot, Chuck, he finds an indulgent sanctuary. But the reach of aesthetic decorum is long. A chilly wind is blowing through Paradise . . . Meanwhile, at the Blue Pacific Wellness Farm, Juanita Diaz, Lacanian analyst, has problems with dissolute musician Frank Hortune, who has problems with his mother and a glad eye for Juanita's lover. Where did Chuck learn his bad-tempered Spanish? Can Juanita keep her man on the couch? Can Bardruin keep his trousers on? Will poetry be the winner on the day? John Newton's verse novel Escape Path Lighting is a throwaway epic, a romp, a curmudgeonly manifesto. The verse bowls along like a summer breeze. The satire leaves no target unscathed. ...Show more

Add to Cart Click & Collect Add to Wishlist
Large chosenjacket  1

Chosen by Geoff Cochrane

$21.95 AUD

Available Stock:
8

Category: Poetry

‘Each and every day, at some point on our walk, he stops and lets me know that this is today's person, the party he wants to be introduced to.' The nineteenth collection of poems by cult Wellington poet and pedestrian Geoff Cochrane. Geoff Cochrane is the author of eighteen collections of poetry, two no vels, and Astonished Dice: Collected Short Stories (2014). In 2009 he was awarded the Janet Frame Prize for Poetry, in 2010 the inaugural Nigel Cox Unity Books Award, and in 2014 an Arts Foundation of New Zealand Laureate Award. ...Show more

Add to Cart Click & Collect Add to Wishlist
Large katecamp

How to Be Happy Though Human: New and Selected Poems by Kate Camp

$32.95 AUD

Available Stock:
6

Category: Poetry

A timely collection of new and previously published work by one of Aotearoa’s most acclaimed poets, How to Be Happy Though Human is Kate Camp’s superb seventh book of poetry. It is published simultaneously in Canada and the United States by House of Anansi Press. Kate Camp’s poetry has been described b y critics as ‘fearless’, ‘wry, sympathetic, affable, deadpan’, and ‘containing a surprising radicalism and power’. Incorporating new, previously unpublished work and a selection of important poems from her six earlier collections, How to Be Happy Though Human represents a new chapter in her career. Camp’s debut collection, Unfamiliar Legends of the Stars, won the NZSA Jessie Mackay Best First Book Award for Poetry on publication over twenty years ago. Subsequent books confirmed Camp as a leading voice of her generation: widely anthologised, studied, and cited as an influence by emerging poets. Her work is recognised for its wide-ranging and eclectic subject matter, its technical control and its musicality, with pop culture, high culture, the domestic confessional, close observation and found language featured as recurring elements. Her fourth collection, The Mirror of Simple Annihilated Souls – which shares a title with Belgian mystic Marguerite Porete’s 1310 collection, a book that caused is author to be burned at the stake – won the poetry award at the New Zealand Post Book Awards in 2011 and marked a turn in her work towards darker and more philosophical subject matter. ‘When I yell at North Americans about how we, too, should be reading the living poets of Aotearoa/New Zealand, Kate Camp is one of the poets I have in mind. She’s one of the poets, too, who’s so amazing because  she doesn’t yell: she’s patient with the world and with its seagulls, attentive to the injustice and the kindness and the frustration we can share with one another, if we’re lucky, anyway. What if Elizabeth Bishop had more friends, and more encouragement early on? What if  “sports fields built on rubbish dumps” became safe places to play? What if, in an exquisite pun, we could see “cranes like cranes”? Here are the land and the sea, the children and the grownups too, both as they are and as we wish they could be: here is “the so-called outside world”, and here is its wonderfully sensitive, fluently understated poet, “absolutely fluent . . . yet somewhat on fire”. —Stephanie Burt Poet, essayist and reviewer Kate Camp was born in 1972 and lives in Wellington. She is the winner of many prestigious awards, including the 2011 Creative New Zealand Berlin Writers’ Residency and the 2017 Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship.  ...Show more

Add to Cart Click & Collect Add to Wishlist
Large aup new poets 7

AUP New Poets 7 by Rhys Feeney, Ria Masae, Claudia Jardine (Edited by Anna Jackson

$32.95 AUD

Available Stock:
1

Category: Poetry

From Apia to Parnell, ancient Rome to Aro Park and on to the furthest reaches of the internet, AUP New Poets 7 takes readers on an eye-popping journey through contemporary New Zealand poetry. The collection opens with Rhys Feeney's passionate take on contemporary global politics and ecological collapse. Next, Ria Masae leads us from a fale in Samoa to the pulsing streets of Auckland city in a voice rooted in the spoken word. And finally Claudia Jardine makes the startling images and unlikely facts from the classical world echo around inner-city Wellington. We see scars and tattoos, mutilated barbie dolls and deep-fried bananas, fat-soluble poisons and indestructible pumpkins as each poet's distinctive vocabulary and sense of rhythm combines in one powerful volume. ...Show more

Add to Cart Click & Collect Add to Wishlist
Large 9781988592404

Every Now and Then I Have Another Child by Diane Brown

$32.95 AUD

Available Stock:
19

Category: Poetry

A mysterious doppelgänger sister, a newborn baby, a boy in a mural, a detective, a former lover, a student stalker ... are they real or imagined? Building on Diane Brown's tradition of extended poetic narratives, Every Now and Then I Have Another Child is an inventive and heartfelt meditation on motherh ood, the creative impulse and the blurred line between imagination and reality. This delightful, evocative poetic narrative wafts between the truly surreal and the 'everyday' absurd. ...Show more

Add to Cart Click & Collect Add to Wishlist
Large 9781988592534

Nouns Verbs Etc: Selected Poems by FIONA FARRELL

$38.95 AUD

Available Stock:
29

Category: Poetry

One of New Zealand's most versatile writers, Fiona Farrell has published four collections of poetry over 25 years, from Cutting Out (1987) to The Broken Book (2011). Nouns, verbs, etc. collects the best work from these books, and intersperses them with other poems thus far 'uncollected'. The themes are wide ranging: political and personal, regional and global, including love and birth and death, war and emigration, history and landscape. The poems mix lyricism with the flat and plainspoken mode of Kiwi vernacular; they channel voices infrequently heard in poetry in traditional song and ballad forms. They are well crafted but unpretentious, jokey yet illuminating, self-deprecating but wise, sad and funny and deeply human. ...Show more

Add to Cart Click & Collect Add to Wishlist
Large 9781847171481

Best-loved Yeats: William Butler Yeats by W. B. Yeats

$29.95 AUD

Available Stock:
30

Category: Poetry

I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams ...Some of the most famous lines in Irish poetry come from the pen of William Butler Yeats, poet, patriot, dramatist and senator. This illustrated collection of forty of his best-loved works, on Love, Politics, Old Age, Myth and Legend includes people, places and events that were important to him. ...Show more

Add to Cart Click & Collect Add to Wishlist
Large 9781988595047

Social Media by MARY MACPHERSON

$27.95 AUD

Available Stock:
10

Category: Poetry

Is our identity more of a composite than we realise? We often think of ourselves as formed from our core values or our DNA, but in Social Media, Mary Macpherson explores identity as a creation of the interactions we have with others: friends, family and the wider world, and the evolving role technology now plays in this. A playful and provocative collection that drills into our social and media selves using elements from short stories and film scripts. ...Show more

Add to Cart Click & Collect Add to Wishlist
Large 9781988595078

Michael, I Thought You Were Dead by Michael Fitzsimons

$27.95 AUD

Available Stock:
10

Category: Poetry

I have a growing number of scars. A three-inch horizontal scar across the stomach, very tidy. Two more small ones either side of the rib cage and now one on the hand and arm to deal with a Viking inheritance. I look at them in the mirror. I hope they don't fade away completely. They are my body art. My favourite poet with a ponytail greets me warmly at the launch of his latest book of poems. Michael, he says, I thought you were dead. Now the stars are burning brightly. I am an explorer of a world beyond the letterbox. By the time I get to Nelson I will be singing again. The heart asks only for more. Michael Fitzsimons gets the news no one wants to hear and finds fear and uncertainty have taken up residence in his house, muting joy and putting the world as he knows it on hold. But in time he discovers that while his life might look like a shipwreck, there's a lifeboat waiting to take him away to a new place, where the most ordinary things gleam with their own extravagance and sorrow slowly gives way to moments of praise. To read Michael, I thought you were dead is to take up an oar and row the same boat a while - a ride not to be missed. ...Show more

Add to Cart Click & Collect Add to Wishlist
Large 9780995110793

Just Looking by Peter Bland

$27.95 AUD

Available Stock:
8

Category: Poetry

An avid collector of works of art, and long fascinated by how artists see the world, Peter Bland has drawn together poems for his 85th birthday that hes written over the years about paintings and the visual image. Never the name-dropper or cultural snob, Bland lines up art by a child alongside art by Br ueghel or Gauguin, and then takes the reader into the story of the painter or the painting, both shining new light and deepening the mystery. ...Show more

Add to Cart Click & Collect Add to Wishlist
Items per page:
1 - 12 of 81 ← Previous 1 2 3 … 6 7 »
Print catalogue

John Reed Book Distribution

PO Box 257 ~ 2/11 Yandala Street, Tea Gardens NSW 2324
Tel +61 2 4997 2936 ; Fax 02 406 322 94
sales@johnreedbooks.com.au



All prices subject to change without notice

System by Circle

© CircleSoft 2021.