Author(s): Lynley Edmeades

Poetry | Aotearoa

In her second collection, Lynley Edmeades turns her attention to ideas of sound, listening and speech.

Listening In is full of the verbal play and linguistic experimentation that characterised her first collection, but it also shows the poet pushing the form into new territories. Her poems show, often sardonically, how language can be undermined: linguistic registers are rife with uncertainties, ambiguities and accidental comedy. She shuffles and reshuffles statements and texts, and assumes multiple perspectives with the skill of a ventriloquist. These poems probe political rhetoric and linguistic slippages with a sceptical eye, and highlight the role of listening or the errors of listening in everyday communication.

Review: Edmeades' poems are terrifically accomplished - they show confidence and a sure, skilful handling of language, even when expressing tentative, slippery ideas and emotions. Her work is full of verbal play, celebration, pleasure and despair. This is a book where you know the poet is intensely alive to language and its possibilities - she's always looking for another angle, another way. Edmeades' voice is an essential one in the 'now' of NZ poetry - Jenny Bornholdt

"Lynley Edmeades’s second book Listening In exhibits exquisite control. There is no recklessness here, but Edmeades’ restrained and brainy playfulness gives the poems permission to interrupt their own syntax and open a gateway to the uncanny...John Cage and Gertrude Stein are guides here. New days with old rhythms. Old thoughts in new geographies. The collection is a sincere and arresting dance with the uncanny, and one of the most intellectually exuberant poetry books to come out of New Zealand in recent memory." - Cordite

Author Biography: Lynley Edmeades is a poet, essayist and scholar. Her first book of poetry, As the Verb Tenses (Otago University Press, 2016), was longlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Book Award for Poetry, and a finalist in the UNESCO Bridges of Struga Best First Book of Poetry. She has a PhD in avant-garde poetics, and lives in Dunedin with her partner.