Milk And Honey

by Leggott, Michele

• ISBN13: 9781869403348
• ISBN10: 1869403347
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2005-09-28
• Publisher: Auckland Univ Pr

Summary

In this beautiful new collection by one of the top Antipodean poets deft word play, allusion and quotation go along with liquid sounds, intense images and stirring rhythms. There are moving elegies and haunting love poems and many echoes of other poets, from Lorca to Robert Duncan to Alan Brunton to pop songs. Each of Leggotts collections is a new step forward and while she challenges the reader she exhibits ever greater mastery of the form, a remarkable and quite distinctive voice.

Author Biography

Michele Leggott is an awardwinning poet and literary scholar. She was born in Stratford, Taranaki, New Zealand, and now lives on Auckland’s North Shore with her family.

Michele is an Associate Professor in the Department of English, University of Auckland, and the Founding Director of the New Zealand electronic poetry centre, the international gateway to New Zealand poetry (www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz). She was the 1980-1985 Canadian Commonwealth Scholar at the University of Columbia, Vancouver.

Michele’s last collection, "As Far As I Can See" (AUP, 1999; www.auckland.ac.nz/aup/books/as_far-m_leggott.html), grew out of her anguish at losing her eyesight. Michele suffers from an unusual condition called retinitis pigmentosa and has been going slowly blind since 1985. Now she can no longer even read her own books. She continues to work as a part-time English lecturer at The University of Auckland and overcomes her increasing blindness by scanning her material into a computer and blowing up the type. Other people read her students’ papers to her.

She leads a highly active creative life, much of it based around paper and publishing and, latterly, the internet. She published three collections of her own poems before "As Far As I Can See". Her first, "Like This?", won the PEN First Best Book of Poetry in 1989 and another, "Dia" (AUP, 1994), won the 1995 New Zealand Book Award for Poetry.

Michele is the principal investigator in a five-person, Marsden Award funded team for research on New Zealand writer Robin Hyde (1906?1939; ww.vuw.ac.nz/nzbookcouncil/writers/hyder.htm). As such, she edited the extraordinary prose poem "The Book of Nadath", written by Robin Hyde in 1937 and finally published by AUP in May 1999. For this, Michele was awarded a Blind Achievers’ Award in November 1999.

She then published, in 2003, "Young Knowledge", a volume of Hyde’s collected poems, described on publication as “extravagantly beautiful” by former poet Laureate Elizabeth Smither and “a landmark for poetry, scholarship and publishing in this country” by the "NZ Listener", which later named it a 2003 Book of the Year. In a first for New Zealand publishing, the very full, meticulous notes for "Young Knowledge" were not published as part of the book itself but were posted on the nzepc website: http://www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/authors/hyde/yk.pdf

Michele co-edited, with poets Alan Brunton and Murray Edmond, the groundbreaking anthology, "Big Smoke" (AUP, 2000; www.auckland.ac.nz/aup/books/big_smoke3.html). A revealing look at New Zealand poetry in the sixties and seventies – the era of protest and revolution, beads and flowers, love not war – "Big Smoke" was published to critical acclaim. It has proved a seminal work that has sparked much debate, resulting in spin-off and rival publishing projects.

She wrote a scholarly study of American poet Louis Zukofsky, "Reading Zukofsky’s Flowers", which was selected as an Outstanding Academic Book of 1990 by US magazine Choice, and was the co-author of the critical work "Opening the Book: New Essays on New Zealand Writing" (AUP, 1995).

Michele appears on AUP’s inaugural New Zealand Poetry CD, "Seeing Voices" (AUP, 1999), and in the poetry video, "Heaven’s Cloudy Smile", (directed by Sally Rodwell; script by the late Alan Brunton, Michele Leggott and Sally Rodwell. Performance by Alan Brunton and Michele Leggott. Red Mole and GG Films, 1998. VHS 30 mins). "Heaven’s Cloudy Smile" premiered at the Wellington and Auckland Film Festivals in July 1998 and was subsequently accepted for competition at Montreal Festival of Films on Art, March 1999.

Michele dedicates much of her time to inspiring others about poetry – besides lecturing and running the nzepc she makes many appearances at readings, literary festivals and other events, runs classes in schools and has judged literary awards.

She represented New Zealan

Table of Contents

Introduction

Author

Foreword

Dawning

Before Next Dawn

Origin

River

Clan Sister

Memory

Horizon

The Mounds

Ceremonial Mounds

Burial Mound

Morning Star

Sun

Dog

Starwood

Corn

Redwing Blackbird

Sunflower

Moon

Blue Star

North Star

The Mounds

Snake Mound

Esoterica

Clan Sister

Deer

Beaver

Buffalo

Fox

Memory

Cupped Boulder

Pipestone Tablets

Intrusions

The Tree at Eminija Mounds

Burial Mound

Ghosts

Skeletons

Jesuit

Clan Sister

Squatters

The Mounds

Tractor

Horizon

The Mounds

Skeletons

Looters

Burial Mound

Early Anthro

River

Looters

Clan Sister

Early Interpreter

The Mounds

Stone Snake Effigy

Memory

Horizon

Clan Sister

Skeletons

Horizon

The Mounds

Portend

The Tree at Eminija Mounds

Ghosts

Prairie Horizons

Skeletons

Clan Sister

Skeletons

The Mounds

Memory

Epilogue

Clan Sister

When the Animals Leave This Place

Acknowledgments

Dedications

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.