Recent years have seen the arrival of new approaches to writing about landscape. Partly to do with new eco-sensibilities, this is however also due to a realisation that landscape writing need not be confined to literary tourism, and to the injection of radical poetic styles. This is the first volume to engage with this new wave of writing.

Anna Mendelssohn (1948-2009) authored poetry, fiction, drama, and life writing; she was also a visual artist, musician, and translator. From the early 1980s, Mendelssohn composed 19 poetry collections and published in journals receptive to her experimental, charged lyrics, and retained a marginal, if constant, presence in the poetry community.

Poetry. Who guides us through the unknown? Who offers the keys? In THE PERFORATED MAP, Eléna Rivera's guide is language as she attempts to navigate the distances, the disturbances, the suggestions, the mistakes, the perforations. In these poems, language is the map, the matter that fills/affects the body, the organizing principle between the self and the world, and the forms that it gives rise to. The sentence is filled with holes. What is graspable between self and other? Is not all language in transit, moving in gradations of light, between knowing and the fuzzy conveyance shaped by words whose meaning is a matter of further adumbrations? How are we able to communicate our experience? How will understanding be sparked? What message is there for the poet/the reader? That is what is at stake in these poems, finding the word, the specific word, to illuminate the way, the experience of life, this moment, this time, this period of history.

To write these poems, I select a paragraph from a Woolf novel-The Waves or Mrs. Dalloway-and only use the words from that paragraph to create a poem. I essentially write poems while doing a word search using Virginia Woolf as source material. I don't allow myself to repeat words, add words, or edit the language for tense or any other consideration. These poems are simultaneously defined by both Woolf's choices with language as well as my own. They feel like an homage to this writer I so admire as well as a way of authentically expressing my lived experience.

Organized in six distinct sections, this debut collection still resonates with an overall cohesiveness. Its poems are original and contradictory--earthy, cryptic, and exquisite. They beautifully utilize the lilting phrase, are attuned to the day's inflections, and have a gentle ebb and flow, which is often echoed visually by the way the poems are laid out upon the page. The lyricism is neither fragile nor overly lavish and often a marvelous stanza is undercut. Sounds are deliberately thrown askew by a laconic expression or a surprisingly forthright final image. Experimental in form, this is poetry that rewards an immersed and slow read. Grounded in the west coast of Auckland and the locales of Karekare, the Manukau Harbor, and the Waitakere Ranges, the poems also reach from ancient Egypt and 15th-century France to 19th-century Tahiti and the United States in 1963. Touching on biography, archaeology, and even astronomy, this compendium proves that poetry can handle both global ideas and universal concerns.

The Red and Yellow Book was published by Textures in 1986, the imprint of Penny Bailey. My recollection is that little from the book had been published elsewhere previously. This was partly because it was written and published very quickly. Its writing was accelerated by the personal events which at first appeared to interrupt my initial ideas about what I thought I was doing. The interruption became the real subject in various guises and my first introduction to such parabasis. The Red and Yellow Book was my second book to be published but in one sense it was the first. It was the first I wrote as a book rather than as a collection of poems. --Kelvin Corcoran

Everything Awake was written during a dreamy, disorienting period of insomnia. In the middle of the night, I began studying Catullus, imagining that his hendecasyllabic rhythms might shush me to sleep. Instead, they prompted a series of eleven-line poems with eleven syllables per line. I was drawn to the number, via Catullus, because it felt both excessive and insufficient, just like the space of an insomniac's day. Eleven opened up onto an expanse in which I could think about dwelling, in a day, at the foot of a wind-swept mountain, in a family of humans, animals and plants, all of whom needed my care. Like Catullus's neoteric poems, these poems attempt to bring the private, domestic space to bear upon the larger, public sphere in hopes that each might inform the other. The assumption of these poems is an ancient one-our most basic daily acts of care, and our most intimate relationships, define our relationship to the larger world. My hope is that these poems might offer one humble account of care in our deeply damaged world. "In Steensen's verse the elusive "seam between dawn and dreams" is luminous, tenderly sewn into gardens of quiet, tucked between tumultuous days and nights. When we find ourselves sleepless, when there is "no feed," when we are "out to sea" her poems are rowboats, groves, refuge. In Everything Awake the known gives birth to the unknown and brings us closer not only to lucid dreams, but to the necessity of lucid wakefulness. This beautiful book provides solace for the unmoored, not by providing fixity, but by reminding us that the lens of the sacred is made of consciousness, excludes nothing, and is always curious." -Laynie Browne

Poetry. Afro-Caribbean Studies. "D.S. Marriott 'dares to dream' in this book...by refolding beautiful romantic lines...into new relation with the real that haunts him, which he attends through mourning and recasts in an art full of loss. These poems do indeed seem to 'contain the whole of death, even before / life has begun', but they engage no refusal, just the overturning of willful stasis and a lyric luring of the undone into poetic doing, to light. HOODOO VOODOO's last section's dark streaming of figures through landscapes...is presided over by 'Ghede', or Guede, after all--best known as the loa of death in Vodou, 'Papa Bones', but also a figure of fertility, of the crossroads between life and afterlife: a trickster, a door, a manipulable sign (as well as a protector of children). Marriott's deployment of such mythological materials and even 'hoodoo' itself in his theatre of 'real ghosts', fears and emergent desires enacts his forging of new relations with the past and his many interlocutors in this book, as well as his Rilkean 'refusal to refuse', a seeming double negative that opens a new way through the many locked doors and crossroads his speakers encounter in these poems. I'm overwhelmed by the beauty that is this book"--Romana Huk.

"Anthony Caleshu's Victor is a wild ride, an arctic adventure, a spirited quest narrative, a mad love poem to the imagination in all its unstrung wild joys. The exuberance of address in this poem is contagious, at once zany and intimate, descriptive and lyric, it's pedal to the metal and won't let up. Caleshu is an extremely gifted and accomplished poet and a true romantic to boot." -Peter Gizzi