As soon as I saw Michele Leggott’s Heartland on Auckland University Press’s release list for this year, I said “yes, please”, having enjoyed both her previous two poetry collections, Milk and Honey and Mirabile Dictu.

Here are the words from Heartland’s  inside cover:

“I stood in the dark with many others, some of them close enough to touch, some further away.

One by one they turned, light fell on faces that were at once strange and familiar, and they began to speak or sing. Soon the riot of their voices was everywhere, the plane of memory tilted at 36,000 feet, fractals caught in the blink of an eye, the clearing of a throat. Heart us invisibly, they said, and I saw the land waiting to invent its people. We walk into the clearing, we wait for light to saturate the eye, we remember.

Heartland is a destination and a song, a shadow and a single word with two chambers.”

Which is all very cryptic and singularly unilluminating, I can’t help feeling, in terms of speaking to potential readers who are not already fans… I’m guessing though, that it’s drawn from one of the works within the book, although that is not referenced.

As part of the inside back cover bio, we also learn that:

“Heartland steps on from Mirabile Dictu (2009), tracing the idea of family as a series of intersecting arcs, some boat shaped, others vaults or canopies, still others vapour trails behind a mountain or light refracted through water.”

In this respect, I do feel that more conventional back cover copy (there is none for this edition) would be beneficial in drawing in new readers. Nonetheless, I am already a fan so did not need to be drawn in—and having already read the first two sections “a little ahead, my shadow” and “unwinding the bird”, I can tell you that—so far, so more than good—I am enjoying Heartland immensely and am looking forward to reading on.

About Michele Leggott:

Michele Leggott MNZM is a professor in the Department of English at the University of Auckland and the founding director of the NZ Electronic Poetry Centre (NZEPC). An award-winning poet and literary scholar, she has published eight previous collections of poems and edited several influential anthologies and collections of essays. In 2007 she was appointed inaugural New Zealand poet laureate (2007–9) and was made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit (MNZM) in 2009 for her services to poetry. In 2013, she won the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Poetry.