Calamities!
Author(s): Jane Arthur
In her second, spine-cracking collection, Jane Arthur wants ‘to get morbid’. Moving with ease between the cerebral and the ethereal she measures her anxieties against a cosmic canvas – taking in everything from meteorites and distant planets to pomanders and cat’s ears.
Whether contemplating time, regret, or the end of the world, these poems don’t flinch. But in writing against hope, Arthur also writes against hopelessness, and finds, at the heart of it all, a bear, sleeping soundly – or perhaps dead.
Cover by Darcy Woods
Product Information
Longlisted for Ockham New Zealand Book Awards 2024 - the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry
'Calamities! is a compelling book of the unsettled and unsettling, set in a world where comfort is an endangered animal and the apocalypse lurks outside our front doors. Jane Arthur’s perceptive and all-too-relatable poems are what we need in these uncertain times – they make me an even bigger fan of her already astonishing body of work.' —Chris Tse
'It’s hard for poems to be funny without undermining their own seriousness, but Arthur’s are like that.' —Kate Camp, The Spinoff
‘She seems to me a poet of scale and embodiment. Her moments are informed by awe and intelligence – quick and seamless. They don’t have to try so hard. I felt novels and films in these poems. I thought: this is a poet of capacity.’ —Eileen Myles
Jane Arthur is the author of Craven, which won the Jessie Mackay Prize for Best First Book of Poetry in 2020. She received the Sarah Broom Poetry Prize in 2018 and has a Master of Arts in Creative Writing from the IIML at Victoria University of Wellington. Born in New Plymouth, she manages and co-owns a small independent bookshop in Wellington, where she now lives with her family.
General Fields
- :
- : Te Herenga Waka University Press
- : UNKNOWN
- : 01 May 2023
- : books
Special Fields
- : Jane Arthur
- : paperback
- : 821.3
- : 72