Blue is a cracked vase in memory

These intensely visual poems reveal the poet’s deep affinity for coastal locations such as Muriwai and Otago Harbour, and her profound response to the work of a number of artists and fellow writers, notably Charles Brasch, Colin McCahon, Kazu Nakagawa, Gerda Leenards, and Anna Caselberg. Others consider the migrant experience, ‘the trees in the forests of memories’, and the connotations of ‘blue’.

Riemke Ensing’s Talking Pictures, Selected Poems (2000) showed her to be a major New Zealand poet. Since then, numerous poems have appeared in journals and anthologies, but she has published only three small collections in limited editions: Storm Warning (2003), O Lucky Man (2009), and If only (2017), the latter two with craft printer Tara McLeod. This volume includes these three books along with more than sixty previously uncollected poems.

‘Every word of it is crafted, poignant and precisely right. There is not even a shadow of a comma to spare.’ ––Kevin Ireland on ‘A different kind of Hemingway episode’, Riemke Ensing’s winning entry in the 2012 NZSA Kevin Ireland Poetry Competition.