Happy birthday. I hope
you’re OK. There’s snow
expected yet, like your smile,
it’s otherwise occupied.
Your gumboots are heavy
with yesterday’s mud, after
I measured the boundary
in order to buy more wire –
that fence is for tomorrow.
It would be good
to have your hands
correcting the tension
then. But I must be
going on, like this, alone.
© David Howard
Inaugural recipient of the New Zealand Society of Authors Mid-career Writer’s Award (2009), and joint winner of the poetry section of the international literary competition to mark the launching of the USP Press by the University of the South Pacific (September 2011), David Howard writes of this new book:
“The incomplete poems is both a summation and a wiping clean of the slate. Here, in their definitive versions, are those poems that I am prepared to stand beside as chalk and duster come to rest next to one another.”
Michael Harlow describes “…..poems of discovery that go beyond mere ‘invention’.” “Surely,” he writes, “David Howard is one of the most original voices in New Zealand poetry….. what [he] knows as a poet is that ‘poetry can make intimate everything that it touches’.”
Brian Turner writes: “When he calls his work 'incomplete' he is, I think, reminding us that just about everything, not just poems, is work in progress; hence 'incomplete'. And yet many of his poems strike me as about as complete as they can be.”
And Cilla McQueen calls his ongoing exploration of relationships between the spiritual, secular and natural worlds “a telling progress”, and speaks of “poems of integrity [that] evidence the development of a skilled and thoughtful poet”.
The distillation of 35 years’ work, an essential book for anyone interested in New Zealand poetry. And I guess it is fair to say that this is Cold Hub Press' first real big book.
ISBN: 978-0-473-18986-0
Softcover with flaps, 274pp
RRP $49.95 from good booksellers
& www.coldhubpress.co.nz
PO Box 156, Lyttelton 8841