Heartland

Michele Leggott’s new book of poetry follows on from her 2009 collection, Mirabile Dictu, in its exploration of light and of gathering dark. Leggott is a poet of the lilting, shining moment, and five of the sections in this collection follow her through her own moments and movements—to Devonport, to Australia, to the North—though these sequences also reverberate with the stories and histories of others. The final two sections take this exploration of character and narrative further as in one we see off a soldier—shadowed by Leggott—to the First World War; and in the other—set in an earlier, unspecified time charted for us by telegraphic weather reports—a family tragedy unfolds, until a body is finally brought home for burial. Previously a poet to whom layout was crucial, the book includes the last poems Michele wrote that she was able to see the shapes of on the page, and thus Heartland gestures back towards previous work while at the same time beginning to chart a new compositional method.

Michele Leggott is a professor in the department of English at the University of Auckland and the founding director of the NZ electronic poetry center. She is the author of seven collections of poems, including Big Smoke, Dia, Like This?, Milk and Honey, Mirabile Dictu, and Reading Zukofsky’s Flowers, and has edited several influential anthologies and collections of essays. She won a Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in 2013; was made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit (MNZM) in 2009, and was the New Zealand Poet Laureate from 2008 to 2009.