My life as a writer is strange, it’s so short – I wonder if it has a future, if I have the power to take hold of my experience, and give it one? … The thing that concerns me most constantly and most painfully is growing old. And being alone, of course. But I don’t write about that, yet … whenever I try, I skulk around the question, eye it balefully, too frightened to close with it … All my life it’s been the same – it’s been hard work to find the substance, the things in experience.

Written in 1991, this passage was like a manifesto foreshadowing the trajectory Lauris Edmond’s poetry was to follow in the remaining years of her life – elegiac yet celebratory, conversational and sociable, yet never far from meditative solitude.

Her evolving poetic self, like her poetry, was shaped by her intelligence a well as her imagination. Spontaneous as her poetry usually appears, like a clear window opening on her world and her life, it is at the same time also about her world and her life. Her poetry is always ‘closing with’ these things, and is never content simply to look at them.

Lauris Edmond died in 2000. This definitive edition of her work is selected and introduced by the poet and critic K.O. Arvidson.

Endorsements                                              

'There is remarkable warmth and humanity which shines through all her poetry. She deals with topics people care about ... and writes of them with courage, candour, and a maturity of perception which amounts to wisdom.' Fleur Adcock

'... it is simply an invaluable collection from a New Zealand poet whose skill lay in making the ordinary extraordinary, and whose preoccupation with human relationships cast a spotlight on more lives than her own.' The Gisborne Herald

Contents                                                       

Introduction

from In Middle Air (1975)
from The Pear Tree (1977) 

from Salt from the North (1980)

Wellington Letter (1980)
from Seven (1980)
from Catching It (1983)
from Selected Poems (1984)
from Seasons and Creatures (1986)
from Summer near the Arctic Circle (1988)
from New and Selected Poems (1991)
from Five Villanelles (1992)
from Scenes from a Small City
from Selected Poems, 1975-1994 (1994)
from A Matter of Timing (1996)
from Late Song (2000)

Bibliography
Index of titles  
Index of first lines