Mezzaluna: Selected Poems

Local Description

Review: 'Leggott, one senses, never stops "looking about": always listening, questioning, searching, peeling away the layers of familiar to see what lies beneath' - Sarah Quigley, NZ Listener. 'Leggott illuminates, like a lightening flash, the delicacy and fragility of a world made of poetry' - David Eggleton, NZ Listener. 'The elegance and joy 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 Michelle Leggott's Mezzaluna' - Rachel Blau DuPlessis, author of Drafts. "Mezzaluna interfuses song, voice, history, politics, love, loss, and breath. Leggott's epic force is never far from her lyric insistences." - Charles Bernstein, author of Near/Miss

Author Biography: 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), all published by 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, 2014) with Martin Edmond. In 2017 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand.

Description

Thirty years of selected poems by the inaugural New Zealand Poet Laureate. Mezzaluna gathers work from critically acclaimed poet Michele Leggott's nine collections, from Like This? (1988) to Vanishing Points (2017). 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. Michele Leggott writes with tenderness and courage about the paradoxes of losing her sight and remaking the world in words. Mezzaluna brings together in one volume the work of this major New Zealand poet.