Author(s): Robert Sullivan

Poetry | Aotearoa | Maori

my old friend I wonder how far north you travel?
The road goes west starting two doors up from The Dog’s Bollix ending at sunset. 
So many sunsets
Facebook and Instagram couldn’t contain them.

Tūnui | Comet is the first collection in more than a decade by one of our most important living Māori poets. Rolling easily between kōrero Māori and the canonical traditions of English-language poetry, through karakia and pōwhiri, treaty training and decolonisation wiki entries, Robert Sullivan takes readers on a marvellous poetic hīkoi.
Guided by Māui and Tāwhirimātea, Moana Jackson and Freddie Mercury, we walk from K’Rd council flats to Kaka Point, finding ourselves and our ancestors along the way. We stand tall before we play the clock out past the reef toward Matariki. Clouds raise their fists as seagulls and sparrows swoon into the rainbow. It has been a long homecoming and he has made the pieces one. 

Review: 'Tunui | Comet displays all the elegance, eloquence and craft one would expect from this Maori writer, who is one of the outstanding poets of his generation. This is a distinctive and rich collection about unity and location, using the compass of poetry to celebrate our archipelago of islands. Robert Sullivan has deftly fused the classicism of the European tradition with Maori animism and a new world wonder, even as he defamiliarises the ordinary.' (David Eggleton)

Author Biography: Robert Sullivan is the author of a number of books of poetry including Star Waka (Auckland University Press, 1999), which has gone through multiple reprints, a graphic novel and a prize-winning book of Maori legends for children. He co-edited, with Albert Wendt and Reina Whaitiri, the anthologies of Polynesian poetry in English, Whetu Moana and Mauri Ola, and an anthology of Maori poetry with Whaitiri, Puna Wai Korero. He has taught at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa and Manukau Institute of Technology.