Just Arrived: “This City” by Jennifer Compton
The Kathleen Grattan Award is New Zealand’s richest poetry prize — and my fellow Tuesday poet, expatriate New Zealand poet, Jennifer Compton, won the Award in 2010.
Her Award-winning collection, This City, was published by Otago University Press in 2011 and I am delighted to have recently purchased a copy.
I won’t be able to really sit down and spend time with it until I’ve finished the DAUGHTER copyedit, but I am very much looking forward to having that time.
In the meantime, here’s what the back cover says:
“This City circles the globe from Florence to Palmerston North but the resulting volume is far more than so-called armchair travel. Topography and public space are a preoccupation (buses and trains, roads and houses, even Google Earth’s Street View all get a mention), but it is her evocation of the transient grounded in these spaces – snippets overheard on an Italian strada, scenes on a bus on Moxham Ave, imaginings of lives from long ago (Jane Austen, Emily Dickenson) – that leaves a taut and exciting impression of lives lived here, in this place, in This City.
And just to entice you further, I’ll post the opening lines:
“I am travelling away from my life, towards my life.
This city knows all my secrets.
And that tram, lit from within, waiting at the end of the line.
This city, which is nowhere else.”
Something to look forward to, indeed…