Into the settled poetry of New Zealand a disruptive force rumbled in magazines and then
burst forth with Malady (1970). Here began the revolution of Bill Manhire. He starts
thriftily, with imagistic poems whose calm voices are at odds with the ego-rant of
neo-romantic contemporaries. Manhire is drawn to economy, to sparsely-peopled landscapes,
the territory of the Norse Sagas (in which he invests serious scholarship) and Antarctica.
He sent his publisher a postcard from Antarctica, where he was poet in residence: he was
making his first day trip to the South Pole.

He generally keeps to stanzas and syntax, but his syntax twists like an Ashberian Möbius
strip. As a scholar he is old-fashioned and wants to communicate, making fun of the
dialects of literary criticism and theory; he is also an explorer in language who doesn't
like to go back to the museum every day but to work in the field. In the briefest moment he
establishes his theme (rhythmic, imagistic, syntactical) and immediately starts playing
variations.

Collected Poems draws on eight previous books.

'A poet of considerable subtlety and strength, a dangerous writer... ' Charles Causley,
Landfall

BILL MANHIRE was born in Invercargill in 1946. He was his country's inaugural Poet Laureate
and has won the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry four times. He holds a personal chair at
the Victoria University of Wellington, where he directs the celebrated creative writing
programme and the International Institute of Modern Letters. His volume of short fiction
South Pacific was published by Carcanet in 1994.