© Cold Hub Press 2011
Price NZ$49.95
The Incomplete Poems
David Howard
ISBN 978-0-473-18986-0
Softcover with flaps, 274 pp
NZ$ 49.95
The Incomplete Poems is both a summation and a wiping clean of the slate. Here,
in their definitive versions, are those poems that I am prepared to stand beside
as chalk and duster come to rest next to one another.
– David Howard
David Howard is a poet of immense gifts. Not least the fact that he knows
how to make poems of discovery that go beyond mere ‘invention’. Poems
that are passionately thoughtful and intelligent; and with a finely tuned
lyric voice that puts feeling first. A poetry that reaches ‘Beyond what is/said
to what is, impossible’. Again and again, how to make the invisible, visible;
and to make it sing.
And he does this in poems that are very much animated by a thoughtful music:
those moments of quick surprise that so often are stunning in their overall
effect. And time and time again, such a pleasure to read, and to hear and know
that he has something to say that matters. And what Howard knows as a poet is
that ‘poetry can make intimate everything that it touches’. Surely, David
Howard is one of the most original voices in New Zealand poetry.
– Michael Harlow
Born in Christchurch (1959), David co-founded Takahe magazine (1989) and the
Canterbury Poets Collective (1990). He spent his professional life as a
pyrotechnics supervisor whose clients included the All Blacks, Janet Jackson
and Metallica. In 2003 he retired to Purakanui in order to write. David was the
inaugural recipient of the New Zealand Society of Authors Mid-Career
Writer's Award (2009) for a body of poetry that has been translated into Dutch,
German, Italian, Slovene and Spanish.
© Cold Hub Press 2011
freepost per copy - national and international
The Incomplete Poems
David Howard
