BILL MANHIRE

A Poetry Book Society Winter 2020 RecommendationBill Manhires Wow opens with the voice of an extinct bird, a song from anciency, and takes us forward into the present and the darkening future of other extinctions. For Manhire, the reach of the lyric is long: it has the penetration of comedy, satire, the Jeremiad, but also the delicacy of minute detail and the rhythms of natures comfort and hope, the promise of renewal. In the title poem the baby says Wow, and the wonder is real at the world and at language. But the world will have the last word.Writing of Manhire, Teju Cole declared, Being the leading poet in New Zealand is like being the best DJ in Estonia, impressive enough on its own terms. But Bill Manhire is more than that: hes unquestionably world-class. As with Seamus Heaney, you get a sense of someone with a steady hand on the tiller, and both the will and the craft to take your breath away.Bill Manhire was New Zealands first poet laureate. He established and until recently directed the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University of Wellington. This is the ninth of his Carcanet books in 30 years. They include a Selected and a Collected Poems.

Bill Manhire, by trade a medievalist and by vocation a poet, has - like those writers who invented and developed English poetry - helped to make something charged and original out of his landscapes (including Antarctica) and his language. He was New Zealands first Poet Laureate and is one of its most popular and entertaining writers. This book traces his evolution over more than four decades, from The Elaboration (1972) through to The Victims of Lightning (2010) and new poems. It is the story of a love affair with the planet: The world is a constant amazement, / always on the move.

Bill Manhire has always subscribed to Paul Valérys definition of poetry as a prolonged hesitation between sound and sense. In that spirit, many of the poems in this new, dazzling collection blend story and song, and do so using everyday words and phrases that suddenly, on the page become new and delightfully weird.Lyrical Ballads is a many-peopled collection: the baffled inhabitants of Every Street and Intermediate Street are here, while Dracula, T.S. Eliot and Bobby Outram from Outram have walk-on parts. The collection is anchored by two long sequences that embrace awkwardness, mystery and absurdity: The Tobacco Tin, a kind of folk story riding along on its own lacunae, and Tell You What, a set of curmudgeonly opinions that evoke the prejudices of a fast-vanishing world.As they notice the small collisions between wonder and everyday reality, and the trajectories of those who dont fit easily in this world, these poems close in on the darker certainties of our lives.