Collected Poems

Into the settled poetry of New Zealand a disruptive force rumbled in magazines and then burst forth with Malady (1970). Here began the revolution of Bill Manhire. He starts thriftily, with imagistic poems whose calm voices are at odds with the ego-rant of neo-romantic contemporaries. Manhire is drawn to economy, to sparsely-peopled landscapes, the territory of the Norse Sagas (in which he invests serious scholarship) and Antarctica. He sent his publisher a postcard from Antarctica, where he was poet in residence: he was making his first day trip to the South Pole. He generally keeps to stanzas and syntax, but his syntax twists like an Ashberian Mobius strip. As a scholar he is old-fashioned and wants to communicate, making fun of the dialects of literary criticism and theory; he is also an explorer in language who doesn’t like to go back to the museum every day but to work in the field. In the briefest moment he establishes his theme (rhythmic, imagistic, syntactical) and immediately starts playing variations. Collected Poems draws on eight previous books.