Poetry

At a time when our personal universes are confined to familiar locales, these poems take readers on vivid journeys through memory and imagination.

By declaring one of those familiar locales - an ordinary street in suburban Hamilton - the very centre of the universe, and arranging poetry about many special places across Aotearoa and the world in concentric circles around it, this collection salutes the transcendence of time, space, familiar worldviews and cuisine that is travelling.

Award-winning and talented new authors from New Zealand and around the globe followed the call of Waikato writers’ group Ampersand to revisit the joys, challenges and encounters of poetic journeys, and to celebrate the art, wit and courage of one of their members who suffers from motor neurone disease.

 “These poems travel through places of wound and asylum, solace and camouflage, whakapapa and grief, through places of reef and yesterday, wreck and tide. Everywhere they go they draw the stations of our human search in glistening fallen detail.” - Tracey Slaughter, Foreword