Scenery And Agriculture

Description

In his new collection, Harry Ricketts finds room for three songs written in Hong Kong in 1975, and a 1979 poem about a War poet. Other poems remember departed friends and early experiences, and celebrate the abiding pleasure of reading, writing and cricket. Formally adroit, Just Then is by turns tender, funny and often surprising.

Reviews

David Beach's first book of sonnets, Abandoned Novel, won the 2008 Prize in Modern Letters for an Emerging Writer, and his second, The End of Atlantic City, was a 2008 Listener Book of the Year. 'This is poetry as arte povera acknowledging its links to grander and more self-confident aesthetic practices of the past, but working improvisatorially with whatever everyday materials happen to lie at hand. The effect is deeply disconcerting (and at times merely annoying), but, collectively, the poems in this volume stake out new territory in contemporary New Zealand poetry and make a powerful case for further exploration.'  Hugh Roberts, Listener, reviewing Abandoned Novel. No hotel lobby or shearers' hut should be without David Beach's third sonnet collection. In fact anyone impatient with the view that Romanticism is the only game in town (or especially country) might enjoy his approach to nature poetry. 'The winner of this year's International Institute of Modern Letters' Prize in Modern Letters for an emerging New Zealand writer is a kind of anti-poet, reflexively suspicious of language's ability to dazzle or seduce and thriving on the disjunction between high-flown literary associations and the insistently prosaic. It's a complex position to occupy, but with The End of Atlantic City and his first book, Abandoned Novel, Beach has established himself as one of New Zealand poetry's most original voices.' New Zealand Listener 'Best Books of 2008'