- Home Page
- Index
- Jenny Powell – Biology Field Trip
- Riemke Ensing – Blue is a cracked vase in memory
- Peter Olds – Over the Road
- Roger Hickin – Minding his own poetry composing business
- Te Purere: The Exodus
- James K Baxter – A Branch Torn Down
- Doc Drumheller – Hotel Theresa
- Dunstan Ward – Departures
- Leonard Lambert – Slow Fires
- Peter Olds – The Glass Guitar
- Roger Hickin – Residual Gleam
- Pat White – Night Shifts
- John Allison – A Long Road Trip Home
- James K Baxter – The Selected Poems
- Peter Olds – Out of the Jaws of Wesley
- Roger Hickin –Roderick Finlayson A Man from Another World
- Michael Harlow – Renoir's Bicycle
- David Howard – Rawaho
- Doc Drumheller – Drinking with Li Bai
- John Gibb – Surprised by Hope
- Peter Olds – Sheep Truck
- John Weir – Sparks among the Stubble
- Alexander Blok – The Twelve
- Jenny Powell – Meeting Rita
- Owen Leeming – Latitudes
- Peter Hooper – Rejoice Instead
- Doc Drumheller– Election Day of the Dead
- John Allison – Near Distance
- A Roderick Finlayson Reader
- Joaquin Pasos – A Poem Goes About on Foot
- Ruth France – No Traveller Returns
- Robert Mclean – Enduring Love
- Tony Beyer – Friday Prayers
- Dunstan Ward – At This Distance
- Friedrich Voit – Karl Wolfskehl A Poet in Exile
- R A K Mason – Uncollected Poems
- John Allison – A Place To Return To
- Dan Davin – From Cairo to Cassino
- Victoria Broome – How We Talk to Each Other
- Ruth Hanover – Other
- Peter Olds – Under the Fuchsia Tree
- Dai Weina – Loving you at the speed of a snail
- Leonard Lambert – Winter Waves
- Heather Bauchop – Remembering a Place I've Never Been
- Robert McLean – Figure & Ground
- Owen Leeming – Through your eyes
- Pat White – Watching for the wingbeat
- Michael Morrissey – Poems from Hotel Middlemore
- Dan Davin – A Field Officer's Notebook
- Rogelio Guedea – Punctuation
- Erik Kennedy – Twenty-Six Factitions
- Jenny Powell – South D Poet Lorikeet
- Karl Wolfskehl – Poetry and Exile
- Tony Beyer – Anchor Stone
- Katharina Muller – The Homeland
- Ted Jenner – The arrow that missed
- Peter Olds – Taking my jacket for a walk
- John Gibb – Waking by a river of light
- Carlos Martinez Rivas – Threnody for Joaquin Pasos
- Blanca Castellon – Water for days of thirst
- Karl Wolfskehl – Three Worlds Drei Welten
- Michael Jackson – Walking to Pencarrow
- Diana Bridge – In the supplementary garden
- Agnar Artúvertin – The Lonesome Savior
- Sophia de Mello – The Perfect Hour
- Poems by Esenin
- Nikolai Baitov – Thirty-nine rooms
- Jenny Powell –Trouble
- Peter Olds – You fit the description
- Rogelio Guedea – If only you hadn't gone
- Ernesto Cardenal – 3 Poems
- John Gallas – Pacifictions
- David Howard – The Speak House
- Frank Koenegracht – Selected Poems
- John Gibb – The thin boy and other poems
- Michael Harlow – Sweeping the courtyard
- Blanca Castellon – Cactus body
- Elizabeth Smither – Ruby Duby Du
- Karl Wolfskehl – To the Germans
- Juan Cameron – So we lost paradise
- David Howard – The incomplete poems
- Jenny Powell – Ticket Home
- Robert McLean – A Graveyard by the Sea
- Sergio Badilla Castillo – Ghosts and shadows
- Sergio Badilla Castillo – The Medusa's head
- Claudia Serea – The System
- Genrikh Sapgir – Psalms
- Floarea Tutuianu – My Dog–the Soul
- Michael Morrissey – Memory Gene Pool
- Peter Olds – Journey to the Far South
- Aleksey Porvin – Live by Fire
- J. Kates – The Old Testament
- Juan Cameron – Invocations to Pincoya in the Country of Rain
- Wayne Seyb – Broken Shadows
- John Gallas – Fucking Poets
- Tatiana Shcherbina – An Offshoot of Sense
- Mikhail Aizenberg – Level with Us
- Gary Langford – Cafe Sonnets
- Stephen Oliver – Apocrypha
- Jeffrey Paparoa Holman – Autumn Waiata
- Jean-Pierre Rosnay – Secret Wars
- Forthcoming titles and Submissions
- Out of print titles
freepost per copy – national & international
price NZ$19.95
Refugees, philosophers, Mesolithic woodworkers, Napoleon, Tarkovsky, Anne Sexton, John Mulgan and Dan Davin are just some of the people we meet, as we journey from the Canterbury Plains to Ravenna and back
to Island Bay, in this collection of 26 new poems of people, places and ideas by Robert McLean.
Robert McLean (b. 1974) holds an MA and an MFA from Canterbury University and is the author of four collections of poetry: For the Coalition Dead (Kilmog Press, 2009), For Renato Curcio (Gumtree Press, 2010), Goat Songs (Kilmog Press, 2011) and A Graveyard by the Sea (Cold Hub Press, 2012). His poems have been included in a number of anthologies, including Essential New Zealand Poems (RHNZ Godwit, 2014), and he was the featured poet in Poetry New Zealand 46. He recently edited A Field Officer’s Notebook, the selected poems of Dan Davin. Robert McLean lives in Featherston and works in Wellington for the New Zealand Government.
“McLean’s work . . . references the great Western literary and philosophical/theological traditions, often engages directly with the world and has a degree of playfulness even in its more sombre reflections.”
––Nicholas Reid
“an admirable and formidable piece of work”
––Nicholas Reid on A Graveyard by the Sea
Publication date: October 15, 2018
FIGURE & GROUND
Poems 2012–2018
Robert McLean
ISBN: 978-0-473-45084-7
Softcover chapbook, 52 pp, 210 x 148mm
Cold Hub Press ~ Robert McLean
At the Tomb of Galla Placidia
Stars hold sway in this little place,
fixed upon the vaulted ceiling
by god-knows-who, whose wilful grace
no longer sets the heavens reeling.
Artifice ensured this constellation gleams,
even now. Of course, slowly but surely,
wheeling planets negate orderly dreams.
Not so for those who came before me.
Foundations sink and visions fade.
And yet Gospellers still look down on us
and calmly smile. All that we’ve made
in their name seems gloriously ridiculous.
Alabaster portals cast little light
on succeeding European disasters,
which are but momently out of sight.
Such monuments will outlast us.
After half-an-hour or so, we depart,
intending to return another day.
We venture on towards more art,
Roman sarcophagi lining the way.
Time, which despoils castles, enriches verses.
Hymning to the rafters gods and man,
we make monuments of blessings and curses,
despoiling, enriching, time and again.
© Robert McLean 2018