We bring poetry to the people this week with a rundown of the finalists in the poetry section of the Montana NZ Book Awards.

It’s a special week for NZ poetry, culminating in Montana Poetry Day on Friday 18 July 2008. The winner of the poetry category will be announced on Montana Poetry Day.

Montana Poetry Day is now a major occasion all over New Zealand and every year it gets bigger and bigger. It’s a fun way for people to express themselves – for published poets and for those who just want to give poetry a go. Whether it’s poetry read on buses, stand up poetry slams or multimedia poetry competitions there is bound to be an event to take your literary fancy.

This week NZLive.com is giving away a special prize pack of all the books that have made the finals in the poetry category. Make sure you get your entry into this week’s draw.

Poetry

Cold Snack by Janet Charman (Auckland University Press)

Janet Charman was born in Taranaki, New Zealand and spent part of her childhood in the Hutt Valley. She now lives in West Auckland with her partner and children.

Janet is now a secondary school teacher after a mid-life career switch and retraining. She originally qualified as a nurse before working in psychiatric hospitals and social welfare situations. She has also been among other things, a radio copywriter, a telephone operator for a TV channel, a tutor at The University of Auckland and runs occasional writing classes.

She has published poems widely in Australian and New Zealand journals and anthologies. Drawing Together, her first collection of poems, written with Marina Bachmann and Sue Fitchett was published by Spiral in 1985. She has since published five critically acclaimed collections with Auckland University Press: Red Letter (1992), End of The Dry (1995), Rapunzel Rapunzel (1999) , Snowing Down South (2002) and Cold Snack (2007).

Cold Snack brims with poems of suburbia, families, workplaces, ordinary life, from the pleasures and pains of becoming a schoolteacher in midlife to a television station receptionist’s view of the ebullient 1980s. All these poems show Charman’s ear for the spoken language and her acute awareness of the sounds, shapes, colours around us and the way they are inhabited by our emotions.

Read work from Janet Charman’s Cold Snack
More about Janet Charman at the NZ Book Council
Buy Cold Snack online

A Long Girl Ago by Johanna Aitchison (Victoria University Press)

Johanna Aitchison was born in the Bay of Islands in 1972. She graduated in Law from the University of Otago (1995) and has worked as a solicitor, barista and legal editor. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Victoria University (1997) and is presently a primary school teacher in Waiouru. Her poems have appeared in Sport, Landfall, Poetry New Zealand, JAAM, Turbine and Polestar.

A Long Girl Ago draws on ten years experience and writing. At its heart are three years Aitchison spent living in a remote fishing village in Hokkaido, Japan, where she taught English in junior high and primary schools and was extensively involved in karaoke and snowboarding. Other poems go back to her previous life, or deal with re-entry into New Zealand society.

Lumiere Reader review of A Long Girl Ago
More information on Joanna Aitchison’s A Long Girl Ago
Buy A Long Girl Ago online

The Pop-Up Book Of Invasions by Fiona Farrell (Auckland University Press)

A highly versatile writer known for award-winning short fiction, plays and novels, Fiona Farrell was born in Oamaru, New Zealand, in 1947 and educated in Otago and Toronto, Canada, where she wrote her thesis on T S Eliot and poetic drama.

Fiona Farrell’s short fiction has won every major New Zealand short story award including the BNZ Katherine Mansfield Award (1984), the American Express Award (1987) and the Mobil–Dominion Sunday Times Award (1988). She has received numerous other awards including the inaugural Bruce Mason Playwrights’ Award (1983), the Mobil Award for Best Radio Drama (The Perils of Pauline, 1990) and the New Zealand Book Award for Fiction (The Skinny Louie Book, 1992). Her novel The Hopeful Traveller (2002) was runner-up in the 2003 Deutz Medal for Fiction at the Montana New Zealand Book Awards and was nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the largest prize of its kind; her recent novel Book Book was a finalist in the fiction category at the 2005 Montana New Zealand Book Awards. A new novel, Mr Allbone’s Ferrets, was published in April.

Fiona Farrell returned to poetry in 1999, after a gap of 12 years, with The Inhabited Initial (AUP), a collection featuring specially designed illustrations by jeweller Ann Culy. Since then Farrell’s poems have been regularly selected for the annual online anthology Best New Zealand Poems. Her new collection The Pop-up Book of Invasions will be published by Auckland University Press in for Montana Poetry Day 2007. The Pop-up Book of Invasions was written while she held an inaugural Rathcoola Writers’ Residency in County Cork, Ireland, in 2006. She was awarded the Prime Ministers Award for Literary Achievement in 2007.

The Pop-Up Book Of Invasions is Fiona Farrell’s poetic response to a six month stay in Ireland. Part travelogue, part family record, part song and myth and history rewritten, this collection revels and laments, offering up an Ireland where history and story are inscribed on the landscape. Aware the world is still washed by waves of invasion and migration, she writes of Māori voyages to New Zealand and her father’s family’s move from Ireland.

Read work from Fiona Farrell’s The Pop-Up Book of Invasions
More about Fiona Farrell at the NZ Book Council
Buy The Pop-Up Book of Invasions online

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