Bill Manhire heads the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University in Wellington, and directs the prestigious creative writing programme. Bill is one of New Zealand’s most renowned poets, and has received many awards and honours.
Read a selection of Bill Manhire's essays, poems and interviews
BOOKS
Collected Poems
Antarctica!
where a single
footprint lasts
a thousand years
-from 'Some Frames'
Into the settled poetry of New Zealand a disruptive force rumbled in magazines and then burst forth with Malady (1970). Here began the revolution of Bill Manhire. He starts thriftily, with imagistic poems whose calm voices are at odds with the ego-rant of neo-romantic contemporaries. Manhire is drawn to economy, to sparsely-peopled landscapes, the territory of the Norse Sagas (in which he invests serious scholarship) and Antarctica. He sent his publisher a postcard from Antarctica, where he was poet in residence: he was making his first day trip to the South Pole.
He generally keeps to stanzas and syntax, but his syntax twists like an Ashberian Möbius strip. As a scholar he is old-fashioned and wants to communicate, making fun of the dialects of literary criticism and theory; he is also an explorer in language who doesn't like to go back to the museum every day but to work in the field. In the briefest moment he establishes his theme (rhythmic, imagistic, syntactical) and immediately starts playing variations. Collected Poems draws on eight previous books.
Lifted
There are mothers and fathers, Kevin, whom we barely know.
They lift us. Eventually we all shall go
into the dark furniture of the radio.
-from 'Kevin'
The last lines of Bill Manhire's astonishing poem 'Kevin' lie at the heart of this book. These poems want urgently to know how the secular spirit can lift itself in the face of mortality and human violence. They are full of richness and courage and surprise, turning from grief to curiosity; then to beauty, humour, anger, gratitude, acceptance - and once again to curiosity. Lifted is a book by a poet writing at the height of his powers.
'Turning the pages of Lifted, no reader can fail to be surprised and delighted by the variety of voices and tones ...Manhire shows not only his mature formal skills but his ability to look unflinchingly into the heart of things. Manhire's poems make us feel as if we are really there.' - Billy Collins, Dominion Post