Lyrical Ballads - Paperback

by Bill Manhire (Author)

Bill Manhire has always subscribed to Paul Valé ry's definition of poetry as ' a prolonged hesitation between sound and sense' . In that spirit, many of the poems in this new, dazzling collection blend story and song, and do so using everyday words and phrases that - suddenly, on the page - become new and delightfully weird.

Lyrical Ballads is a many-peopled collection: the baffled inhabitants of Every Street and Intermediate Street are here, while Dracula, T.S. Eliot and Bobby Outram from Outram have walk-on parts. The collection is anchored by two long sequences that embrace awkwardness, mystery and absurdity: ' The Tobacco Tin', a kind of folk story riding along on its own lacunae, and ' Tell You What', a set of curmudgeonly opinions that evoke the prejudices of a fast-vanishing world.

As they notice the small collisions between wonder and everyday reality, and the trajectories of those who don't fit easily in this world, these poems close in on the darker certainties of our lives.

Author Biography

Bill Manhire was born in Invercargill, New Zealand, in 1946. He was his country's inaugural Poet Laureate and has won the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry four times. He headed the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University of Wellington, establishing and directing the university's prestigious creative writing programme. His volume of short fiction, South Pacific, was published by Carcanet in 1994. His poetry collections include Lifted (2007), and his Collected Poems (2001) and Selected Poems (2014).