Poetry NZ 34

Description

ISBN: POETNZ34
Title: Poetry NZ 34
Author: POETRY NEW ZEALAND

Issue 34 features the work of Bernard Gadd, a New Zealand poet, editor and anthologist.

A trip to London, Surrey and the South of England in 2006 permitted me to make a number of visits to British libraries and bookshops including Waterstones, a very large bookshop in London’s Trafalgar Square. It was enlightening (and dismaying) to discover very few poetry collections, anthologies of poetry or poetry magazines in any of these locations and little or no contemporary poetry of any kind – British or otherwise. The poetry sections of bookshops and libraries occupy a minuscule amount of shelving, and what’s there is almost entirely British ‘mainstream’, more or less as described by Sarah Broom in PNZ 33 – technically sound but relatively boring and written in a narrow range of conservative styles confirming a view that what appears in most New Zealand literary journals is much more vigorous and exciting.

And again, as demonstrated by Sarah Broom and as often seen in PNZ, there’s vigorous and exciting poetry in the UK, but the near impossibility of ending it there is a sad reflection on the current state of poetry in the British Isles. Worse, and in spite of an assiduous search in London and Southwest England, it was even more difficult to and any New Zealand poetry or action there except for a woebegone copy of Maurice Gee’s Plumb in the rather modest West Horsley Library. In contrast however, even the smallest of corner stores offered a reasonable selection of New Zealand wines! This is significant because it demonstrates how well New Zealand’s wine producers have done in accessing the British market, while New Zealand book publishers have done so very poorly in comparison.

Format: Paperback
Available stock: 1