Someone's leaving: in every scene
someone's stepping into the sea.
History is at their backs -- the dream
of a Golden Age in pastoral ruins.


from `Embarkations'
              

In the twelve years since Peter Bland's last collection, The Crusoe Factor, was published by London Magazine Editions, the poet has not been idle. Setting the best of his earlier work, long unavailable, beside a full volume of new poems, he lets us in on forty years' poetry. We follow him from Scarborough in the 1930s to Wellington in the artistically vibrant 1950s, to contemporary narratives set in Britain and in New Zealand. Allen Curnow praises Bland's 'sense of the centuries past or passing show', and the critic Kevin Ireland writes: 'few contemporary poets are more strikingly visual or have greater graphic energy'.

Christopher Hope in the London Magazine noted Bland's 'unnerving sense of the world out of kilter' and his 'considerable comic gift'. Bland's example helped establish a new urban subject matter in New Zealand in the early 1960s. Since his return to London, his narratives of exile and displacement speak a wide range of vernaculars with great subtlety.