Tight, lyrical, linguistically muscular, the poems he sent me grabbed the attention. Now, his first collection, Reading the Water, has just appeared and I’m delighted to see it’s a stunning, well-crafted book.

Reading the Water is a richly woven collection which capably showcases Schimmel’s love of language, symbolism and poetic craft .

Siobhan Harvey - Editor of Takahe Magazine at the time of the review.

Paul Schimmel’s debut collection is a quietly stunning achievement. These carefully crafted poems talk about our relationship to the natural world. They go beyond invention into discovery; on one hand paying scrupulous attention to what we can read in the landscapes of nature, and on the other going deeper into the often mysterious landscapes of the human heart.

Michael Harlow - Recipient of the New Zealand Prime Minister’s award for poetry in 2018.

Praise for ‘Sigmund Freud’s Discovery of Psychoanalysis: conquistador and thinker’ Routledge UK, 2014.

So he has taken on a challenge [in writing yet another book on Freud] and it is one he succeeds in meeting.

What is distinctive is Schimmel’s generous, intelligent engagement with Freud’s intellectual and emotional struggles…

From Humphrey Morris’s review in: Journal of The American Psychoanalytic Association.

Paul Schimmel is a psychoanalyst and writer. Originally from New Zealand, he currently lives and works in Sydney, although looks forward to retiring to Aotearoa (New Zealand). He has had poetry published in various, mainly New Zealand, literary magazines, a book of poems in 2016, and a psychobiographical study ‘Sigmund Freud’s discovery of psychoanalysis: conquistador and thinker’, published by Routledge UK, in 2014. He has always been a keen fisherman, as witnessed by this text.