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Enchanting and sustaining poems by the first Poet Laureate of New Zealand
Mezzaluna gathers work from Michele Leggott's nine books of poetry. As reviewer David Eggleton writes: "Leggott shows us that the ordinary is full of marvels which . . . stitched, flow together into sequences and episodes that in turn form an ongoing serial, or bricolage: a single poem, then, rejecting exactness, literalism, naturalism in favor of resonance, currents, patterns of ebb and flow." In complex lyrics, sampling thought and song, voice and vision, Leggott creates lush textured soundscapes. Her poetry covers a wide range of topics rich in details of her New Zealand life, full of history and family, lights and mirrors, the real and the surreal. She focuses on appearance and disappearance as modes of memory, familial until we lose sight of that horizon line and must settle instead for a series of intersecting arcs. Leggott writes with tenderness and courage about the paradoxes of losing her sight and remaking the world in words.
on white you fall
into line
her voice fills
the ground
potato cuts
the sun
dries paints
the deck prints
shapes shadows
of oranges
green
'cyan and
magenta'
sail
your picnic
sea
into the eye
land crimson
lemons
hand me
the moon
risen rode
rose ride
white
out to see
From Like This? • "on white" • "WATERMELON WORLD" • "27" • "AN ISLAND" • "WITHYWIND" • "road Music" • "its an evening warm as your unfinished conversation" • "Garbo in a Gown" • From Swimmers, Dancers • "Dear Heart" • "Colloquy" • "Oldest and Most Loyal American Friend" • "Reading Zukofsky's 80 Flowers" • "Merylyn or Tile Slide or Melete" • "Tigers" • From DIA • "Where exactly are we? • "MICROMELISMATA" • "BLUE IRISES 1-21" • "KEEPING WARM" • From As far as I can see • "dove" • "hesperides" • "torches" • "a woman, a rose, and what has it to do with her or they with one another? 1,2,4" • "ice stone" • From Milk & Honey • "wilderness" • "faith and rage" • "cairo vessel" • "future song" • From Journey to Portugal • "the words" • "verde, verde, verde" • "she counts ten angels" • "domingo" • "house of the fountains" • From Mirabile Dictu • "work for the living" • "mirabile dictu" • "tell your mama" • "slow reader" • "primavera" • "keep this book clean" • "peri poietikes" • "more like wellington every day" • From Heartland • "spirits bay" • "listening" • "degli angeli" • "never dreaming" • "lomu" • "olive" • "experiments (our life together)" • "a brief history of time" • "matapouri" • From Vanishing Points • "The Fascicles 1,2,3" • "Emily and Her Sisters" • "Figures in the Distance 1,2,3,5,6,7,12,15,18,24,25,28,29,30" • "the wedding party"
Michele Leggott was the inaugural New Zealand Poet Laureate 2007-2009 and received the Prime Minister's Award for Literary Achievement in Poetry in 2013. Her collections include Vanishing Points (2017), Heartland (2014) and Mirabile Dictu (2009), from Auckland University Press. She coordinates the New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre (nzepc) with colleagues at the University of Auckland, and has co-edited Alan Brunton's selected poems, Beyond the Ohlala Mountains (Titus Books 2013) with Martin Edmond. In 2017 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand.
"Leggott is arguably our finest living female rhapsodist."
~David Eggleton, New Zealand Listener
"The elegance of her eros of being, her intelligent and enchanted seeing, the dazzling range of her experimentalist sensibility, and her world-streaming scope all combine to create the intimate brilliances of Michele Leggott's Mezzaluna."
~Rachel Blau DuPlessis,, author of Drafts
"Michele Leggott is one of the South Pacific's most inimitable poets. Her complex and varied poems, characteristically uninterrupted by punctuation, embody culture, history and the personal. These remarkably discerning, artful, sometimes haunting poems will deepen your attention and quicken your senses."
~Pam Brown, author of Click here for what we do
"In this delicious and sustaining collection across the writing life of Michele Leggott, 'blue mako clit' and kiss, sight's amnesia forgets to stay. This is poetry as bodyography and history, an affectively thrilling read."
~Lisa Samuels, author of Tender Girl
"Mezzaluna interfuses song, voice, history, politics, love, loss, and breath. The poems have a gravity that cuts against their sometimes hallucinogenic surfaces. Leggott's epic force is never far from her lyric insistences."
~Charles Bernstein, author of Near/Miss
"I have to hand it to the American designers of the book. They've done a wonderful job of navigating the difficult layouts of some of the earlier books - from the long lines of 'An Island' (Like This?, 1988); the collage layouts of 'Tigers' (Swimmers, Dancers, 1991) and 'Micromelismata' (DIA, 1994); all the way through to the prose poetry of 'The Fascicles' (Vanishing Points, 2017). They've also divided up the selections from each book with standardised pageworks, to facilitate moving from one to the next. It's an elegant solution to the problem of how to assert unity - this is all (now) one book - and variety - the fact that it consists of discrete sections from a number of other books, each ordered with at least as much care for precise detail. Michele never ceases to surprise."
~A Gentle Madness Blog
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