Ian Wedde's new poetry collection, his fourteenth, finds him still in business. At the heart of the book is the stunning 'Good Business' sequence, at once an ode to walking the side-streets of central Wellington and an elegy for the poet's father. Quietly hilarious, the poems are titled after Wellington businesses and institutions - Tony's Tyre Service, Metalworx Engineering, Wellington Scrap Metal, the KFC on the corner of Pirie Street and C O Products Ltd. Gradually, though, Wedde's jaunty and self-deprecating tone becomes more serious and elegiac. Other sequences include "Seven Dreams" and the lyrical but mordant "Arriving Blind", in which Wedde travels from Bangladesh to the south of France, playing with the contrasts of light and dark, dawn and dusk, arriving and departing, sight and blindness.
Author Biography
Ian Wedde, poet, fiction writer, critic and art curator is the author of 13 previous collections of poems, three novels, short stories, essays and criticism, and the editor of several anthologies. He won the Book Award for Fiction for his first novel, Dick Seddon's Great Dive, and the NZ Book Award for Poetry for Spells for Coming Out (AUP). He was the Burns Fellow in 1972 and has held a Writers' Bursary, the Scholarship in Letters (twice), the Victoria University writing fellowship and is the 2009 University of Auckland/Michael King Writer in Residence. He was awarded an Arts Foundation Laureate Award in 2006. His most recent book is Bill Culbert: Making Light Work, (AUP, 2009).
