Trifecta looks at the odds in the lives of the three children of Martin and Agnes Klepka. Martin was one of the refugees of Nazism who famously brought Modernist architecture and 'real coffee' to New Zealand. Many years after his early death from a heart attack, Klepka's children are struggling in their different ways with the difficult legacy of their charismatic, overbearing father. Sandy, who was disliked by his father, is a cultural historian in the twilight of his career, disgraced, divorced and reduced to a .2 position at Auckland University. Veronica, who bored her father, is struggling with a failing art deco Napier tour company and an alcoholic husband. And Mick, Martin Klepka's favorite, a gambling, methamphetamine and sex addict, is still living alone in the Red House, his father's plagiarized masterpiece.
Steeped in the brilliance of the banal and the daily splendours of language, Wedde presents a beautifully controlled and ordered sequence of verse in Tendering: New Poems. The book was written, he says, 'in the ghostly presence of my great grandfather Heinrich Augustus Wedde, the last ship-rig pilot on Wellington harbour'. Powerful visions of ships, the sea and of Pacific voyages of exploration pervade the collection, as does that mean city to where the ships return home.
From early childhood in postwar Blenheim to the remote regions of Bangladesh, from an English boarding school to 1960s Auckland, and from Jordan during the civil war of 1969–70 to family homes full of children, this dazzling book traces the many shifts in Ian Wedde's life. Haunted by the ghosts of his restless German and Scottish great grandparents, and of his wandering parents, Wedde is always looking over his shoulder as he writes. His companion throughout is his twin brother Dave, who shared their first home—their mother Linda's womb—and who, as the book ends, hosts a lunch where the brothers raise their glasses to the transit lounges of their lives. Affectionate, funny, sad, analytical, but above all honest, The Grass Catcher is at once a moving personal memoir and an engaging and reflective essay on the nature of memory.
The Drummer is Ian Wedde's eighth collection and it is plump with exquisite visual images, lost faith in language, revelations of intense beauty and literary allusions (from the Romantics to the New Zealand tradition). This is what the author writes about his collection: 'The word 'transport' seems to me to describe an event anywhere between a bus-trip and a vision. The dogged example of Odysseus in one margin, the raptures of language in another. The bliss of movement, the transport of dreams. The word romance is uniting gravity and desire. It is the romance I wanted for poems and these are the few poems that got there.
This collection of poetry features five extended poems that explore the concept of beauty and the nature of language, discussing serious philosophical ideas with zest, energy, wit, and humor. A unique volume featuring remembered and misremembered song lyrics from John Lennon, Lou Reed, Johnny Cash, Emmylou Harris, Gram Parsons, Ryan Adams, and Courtney Love, among others, it also includes fragments from philosophers and poets of the sublime, especially William Wordsworth and John Ruskin, and from religious texts such as the Bible and the Tao-Te Ching. Through glimpses of imperfection, Wedde offers a fresh take on the familiar, sparking a new vision of the world and its wonders.
A strong new collection from an important poet, his first in seven years. It draws inspiration from the odes of Horace (and Keats), shows a new reflective and sober mood, but also evokes the rich world of the senses and the pleasures of the moment.
Ian Wedde has been a major presence in New Zealand poetry since his work began appearing in journals in the late 1960s. His first book of poetry appeared in 1971; his sixth book won the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry in 1978; his sixteenth and most recent was a finalist in 2014. By the mid-1980s, as well as shaping his own verse, he had become an influential critic and shaper of larger trends in poetry as one of the co-editors of The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse (1985) and The Penguin Book of Contemporary New Zealand Poetry – Nga Kupu Titohu o Aotearoa (1989). After a quiet spell in the mid- to late 1990s came the much celebrated The Commonplace Odes in 2001, in which Wedde offered the Horatian/Keatsian ode as transformative a moment as Baxter had given the sonnet back in 1970. Three excellent books followed, most recently The Lifeguard: Poems 2008–2013, published at the end of his tenure as New Zealand Poet Laureate. While Wedde has constantly experimented with and pushed boundaries of form and influence in his poetry, his work returns often to key themes and ideas, preoccupations and effects that this book throws into brilliant relief: a politics of language, social and ecological relationships, how memory works, the perceptual world. The son Carlos of Earthly: Sonnets for Carlos (1975) is now a father himself; Ian Wedde's poems are now more likely to feature grandchildren. But the ranging, tenacious, conceptual-romantic poet, with his linguistically rich but intellectually rigorous voice, is the same, and tracing that voice through nearly five decades will be one of the many pleasures readers take from this book. With selections from 1971's Homage to Matisse all the way through to 2013's The Lifeguard, Ian Wedde's Selected Poems will introduce readers new and old to one of New Zealand's most distinguished contemporary poets.
From jaunty and self-deprecating to serious and nostalgic, the poems in this collection paint a vivid portrait of Wellington businesses and institutions. Quietly hilarious, the verse captures the essence of Toyota, Tony's Tyre Service, Metalworx Engineering, Wellington Scrap Metal, the KFC on the corner of Pirie Street, and the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. At the heart of this collection are three stunning sequences: an ode to walking the streets of Wellington, a gathering of surreal and quirky moments, and a lyrical approach to the author's travels from Bangladesh to the south of France. Playing with the contrasts of light and dark and dawn to dusk, this compendium also explores the balance between departures and arrivals as well as the seen and unseen.
A collection of poems by one of New Zealand's major poets, Spells for Coming Out exhibits a unity derived from mood and circumstance. Memories of Europe, regrets at the absence of 'friends, fugitives and lovers', dominate the opening section, and recur later when the physical scene before the poet is Mount Cargill and Otago Harbour. The feeling is lyrical, the structure informal, the clues are there to be followed into layers of resonance and meaning.
Tales of Gotham City consists of three groups of poems that were written over a period of seven years, from 1977&–83. Ian Wedde says of this collection: When I went 'greedily' looking for meaning among the poems I'd written since about 1977, I found the record of a withdrawal of curiosity, its replacement with a counterpart anger. I'd wanted to know why not, not why. I'd heard myself answering kids' questions with my own. There were too many experts. Who did they think they were, these people with such confidence in their cigars, their sex, their history. That's me trying to step out of that sentence. We leave in order to come back. We don't need heroes, we need us.
Ian Wedde's latest collection of poems are a complex mix of rhapsody, fear, and humor, and the prose explore the contradictions between life's pool-side surfaces and frightening undertows. Opening with a major new series of poems &“The Lifeguard,&” it concludes with another long sequence, &“Shadow Stands Up,&” in which a world of Platonic memory and tidal recurrence is observed from a window-seat in Auckland's conspicuously green-branded Link bus. Bringing together work from the past five years by one of New Zealand's most outstanding contemporary poets, this collection shows a master of the are at his thoughtful and surprising best.
Pregnant after rape, seventeen-year-old Josephina Hansen is exiled from her family home in Kiel in the north of Germany. She finds refuge with her sister's Danish family in S&ønderborg, then in Hamburg with a philanthropic businessman and, later, a radical journalist and his sister. In 1880 the worsening political situation forces this makeshift family into exile &– and a new life in a small farming settlement in the Kaitieke valley in New Zealand.Accompanying Josephina on the journey is an ancient sewing sampler given to her by her grandmother. In its lovingly stitched pictures she finds a way of mapping the world she has come from &– and that is traversed by the birds of her childhood, the Rohrs&änger or reed warblers, which migrate yearly from the salt marshes near her home to &‘somewhere nice and warm where the oranges grow'.Josephina's story is framed by the reunion of Frank and Beth, descendants of two of her three children by different fathers. It is Beth's discovery of the reason for the disappearance from the family story of Josephina's third child that unlocks memory and meaning from the intricately stitched story of the migrating reed warblers.The Reed Warbler is a beautiful and rich family saga that weaves together the lives of six generations, overseen, as Josephina's son Wolf would observe at a family reunion in 1915, by &‘Ma with that glint in her eye'.
The poems that make up Castaly: Poems 1973&–77 have been selected by the poet from work completed over the course of four years. Ian Wedde writes: The poems in this book represent my attempts to remain alert in the world between 1973 and 1977. . . . Nevertheless my main obsessions (sometimes called 'themes') have remained the same, though not habitual I hope. They are few, and if they don't come across in these poems, well, I did the best I could. (That's all I am telling.) Last night I had a comical dream in which all the typists from the typing pool of a large insurance company hurled their typewriters down the lift-shaft of the building. This odd vision is what I have to get on with now, it's still mine, whereas the poems in this book belong (with thanks) to whoever cares to read them. (I suspect the dream offered a metaphor for wasted emotions. I recognise another voice which says, 'Nothing is wasted' . . .
Christopher Hare has done well for himself: one of the world’s top food writers, he has travelled to the best restaurants in the most exotic locations, accompanied by the chic dining companion known to readers of his lavish books as Thé Glacé. But when the credit crunch ushers in a new age of austerity, it’s uncertain whether his audience will still have an appetite for his thoughts on Robuchon and caramelized quail. Certainly Christopher’s editor has had his fill. One evening, as he explores the budget options in a mediocre restaurant in off-season Nice—alone, for Thé Glacé, his erstwhile wife Mary Pepper, has left him to find international fame and fortune as an art photographer of pornographically eroticized foodstuffs—Christopher witnesses an assassination. Impulsively, he throws himself into the action, and becomes the almost-willing victim of a political kidnapping. Will his ex-wife come to his rescue? Will the harshly beautiful Palestinian pediatrician Hawwa Habash soften toward her accidental prisoner? Suffused with culinary delights and political menace, this funny, fast-paced novel uses a fascination with food as a metaphor for an age obsessed with excess and the ultimate rejection of it.
Selected stories from one of New Zealand's most well known authors, Ian Wedde. Largely written in the years between 1970 and 1980, the collection includes the award winning Dick Seddon's Great Dive.
Passionate, witty, and erudite, these essays by a radical curator describe how museums approach their sometimes conflicting missions to sponsor scholarship, generate popular appeal, and claim social significance. This analysis includes discussions of art and ethnology, the failure of late-Modernist art history, the construction of official culture, the intellectual history of European exploration in the Pacific, problems with cultural studies of the Pakeha Maori, and the conservation of archives and narratives.
Little Frank' is 120 years old and he's lost his mind - or the part that can put damaged memories back together. Once the gang boss of 'The Place', he's traded his imagination for secure long life. Trapped in a luxurious present of mindless routine, he's jolted awake in 2090 to the bizarre facts of his world: his obsession with the female lead at the Chinese Opera, his unsavory liaison with the Binh Xuyen body-part pirates, their surveillance of his movements. Above all, his lost memory of the moment in a pine-scented limo when he traded his imagination for long life." "To rebuild this memory, Little Frank has to abandon longevity. Will he recover the truth before he Times Out? Will he have time to understand his obsession with the singer Madame Hee? What happened to the young mother who abandoned him? Will he have time to revenge himself on the ghoulish Dr. Smiles, and the wet-liver-lipped Binh Xuyen boss, Tamar? Will Little Frank finish his Chinese Opera?" --Book Jacket.
New Zealand's spectacular scenic views are used in this bitingly satirical novel as launching platforms for the catastrophic road trip by a team of dysfunctional cultural tourism consultants. They disappear, they go berserk, they self-destruct, the end up in porn sites and sit-down ablution facilities for the elderly. It's Beauty, Purity, Authenticity, Adventure and Hospitality that destroy the team. Combining satire, essay and road-trip storyline, The Viewing Platform also asks the questions: where are we when we re at home? In the sex-bandit underworld of Bangladesh ('Get here before the tourists do'), amid the marketable beauties of New Zealand s iconic landscapes, on Cowgirl.com, in the demand-side danger and supply-side safety of adventure tourism, in an Absolutely Pure place, home goes terribly wrong. So what survives'.
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