Watching for the Wingbeat includes work from Pat White’s earlier out-of-print titles; selections from “Gnossienne” (previously available only as a limited edition publication); “From the Valdimar Notebooks”, a recent unpublished sequence of 43 keen-eyed short-poem observations of the natural world; and eleven additional new poems.

Pat White’s poetry embraces the environment, history and time, and celebrates the rhythms that govern rural life with a sense of the transcendental rare in contemporary New Zealand writing. He writes about living in South Canterbury, the Wairarapa, and on the West Coast, with “an ease about being there, whether it is reflecting on the effects of drought, the mist rising off a dam, or listening to the stars.” (John Horrocks) Reviewing How the Land Lies: Of Longing and Belonging in the NZ Listener, Jeffrey Paparoa Holman wrote: “Painter, poet, genealogist, biographer, and now memoirist: White is a jack-of-all-trades and masters many. He pays his debts to [Peter] Hooper, Gary Snyder and a host of others, in the process becoming our own accessible, contemporary Henry David Thoreau.”

“Poetry with its eye on ‘real things’––on work, on weather, on love, on finding the right name for things at the moment they are slipping away . . . with the everyday presented as the rare privilege it is.  

                               ––Vincent O’Sullivan

What was offered  

        Caselberg House, 18 February 2015 

Spring tide keeps her contract

with the planet, motion and sound.

Getting on with our lives

we sat in the garden quietly.

I didn’t come here to see that

stick-insect put to the sword

by a wasp, in last light amongst

totara, rimu trunks, ponga fronds––

but, that’s what was on offer.

© Pat White 2018