Gorse Poems
Wholesale $18.25 + GST
RRP $35.00
ISBN 9781877441165
This debut collection of poetry is based around the emblem of gorse – that barbed colonial invader that was first introduced to windbreak off native land into farmland, for the use of settlers. This touches on many of the main themes in the book: historical land grievances, ecological disaster, and worker exploitation.
Gorse Poems has a social conscience at its heart, that is battered against the inequalities and injustices of contemporary New Zealand. But it also has a lyrical and postmodern persuasion, that is interested in what language can do – how the rhythms can be regulated, how words stacked in long DNA chains can spiral down the page building to a volume that threatens to overrun the reader. Throw into the mix an unusual obsession with the high modernism of the American poet Hart Crane, and we have a book of New Zealand poetry that is deeply refreshing.
Chris Holdaway co-founded both the poetry journal Minarets, and the award-winning publishing outfit Compound Press. He is the author of the chapbook HIGH-TENSION/FASHION (Greying Ghost, 2018) and his poetry has been published in various journals including Brief, Cordite, Cream City Review, Landfall, Oversound, Poetry NZ Yearbook, The Seattle Review and Shearsman Magazine.
Published by Titus Books, April 2022
Soft cover, 72 pages
145x200mm, upright
Wholesale $18.25 + GST
RRP $35.00
ISBN 9781877441165
This debut collection of poetry is based around the emblem of gorse – that barbed colonial invader that was first introduced to windbreak off native land into farmland, for the use of settlers. This touches on many of the main themes in the book: historical land grievances, ecological disaster, and worker exploitation.
Gorse Poems has a social conscience at its heart, that is battered against the inequalities and injustices of contemporary New Zealand. But it also has a lyrical and postmodern persuasion, that is interested in what language can do – how the rhythms can be regulated, how words stacked in long DNA chains can spiral down the page building to a volume that threatens to overrun the reader. Throw into the mix an unusual obsession with the high modernism of the American poet Hart Crane, and we have a book of New Zealand poetry that is deeply refreshing.
Chris Holdaway co-founded both the poetry journal Minarets, and the award-winning publishing outfit Compound Press. He is the author of the chapbook HIGH-TENSION/FASHION (Greying Ghost, 2018) and his poetry has been published in various journals including Brief, Cordite, Cream City Review, Landfall, Oversound, Poetry NZ Yearbook, The Seattle Review and Shearsman Magazine.
Published by Titus Books, April 2022
Soft cover, 72 pages
145x200mm, upright
Wholesale $18.25 + GST
RRP $35.00
ISBN 9781877441165
This debut collection of poetry is based around the emblem of gorse – that barbed colonial invader that was first introduced to windbreak off native land into farmland, for the use of settlers. This touches on many of the main themes in the book: historical land grievances, ecological disaster, and worker exploitation.
Gorse Poems has a social conscience at its heart, that is battered against the inequalities and injustices of contemporary New Zealand. But it also has a lyrical and postmodern persuasion, that is interested in what language can do – how the rhythms can be regulated, how words stacked in long DNA chains can spiral down the page building to a volume that threatens to overrun the reader. Throw into the mix an unusual obsession with the high modernism of the American poet Hart Crane, and we have a book of New Zealand poetry that is deeply refreshing.
Chris Holdaway co-founded both the poetry journal Minarets, and the award-winning publishing outfit Compound Press. He is the author of the chapbook HIGH-TENSION/FASHION (Greying Ghost, 2018) and his poetry has been published in various journals including Brief, Cordite, Cream City Review, Landfall, Oversound, Poetry NZ Yearbook, The Seattle Review and Shearsman Magazine.
Published by Titus Books, April 2022
Soft cover, 72 pages
145x200mm, upright
Praise
“Chris Holdaway’s Gorse Poems is a startlingly brilliant debut collection. Here is a postcolonial epic written in a textured language that not only exalts, contorts and repels, but is true to the difficult music of reality. In Gorse Poems Holdaway affirms that, of all poetic traditions, Romanticism is still the most enduring.”
—Michael Steven, winner of the 2021 Kathleen Grattan Award for Poetry
“Taking up the quixotic double subjects of landbound, invasive gorse (Ulex europeus) and the US poet Hart Crane who was lost at sea, Chris Holdaway casts a net of lyric inquiry both hushed and expansive, epigrammatic and bare of heart. The Poems trace the tracings of loss, and of gorse, an unkillable species that, in learning to die, becomes an unexpected site of possibility and regrowth. Water itself is in the only true bridge, the poem says to itself, as if trying out a knowledge it used to know by heart. These are poems for our late hour, poems about washing up on shore, and coming back down to earth.”
—Joyelle McSweeney, author or Toxicon and Arachne