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In 2003, while in Poland promoting the Polish translation of her book Unquiet World: The Life of Geoffrey Count Potocki de Montalk, Stephanie de Montalk slipped in a hotel bathroom and injured her pelvis. This event goes unmentioned in the poem 'Warsaw', but the story of a later trip to France for surgery on the injury is told in the poems in part II of this book. Many of the other poems are concerned with the kinds of journey we make in imagination or memory.
In How Does It Hurt?, acclaimed poet and biographer Stephanie de Montalk tells the story of the chronic pain that has invaded her life for more than 10 years. She considers how her early experiences have been cast into fresh relief by what she has endured, then goes back in time to investigate the lives and works of three writers who also lived with and wrote about pain: "the consolator," English social theorist Harriet Martineau (1802–1876), "the vendor of happiness," French novelist Alphonse Daudet (1840–1897), and "the imago," Polish poet Aleksander Wat (1900–1967). Through these explorations de Montalk confronts the paradox of writing about suffering: where we can turn when the pain is beyond words? A unique blend of memoir, imaginative biography, and poetry, How Does It Hurt? is a groundbreaking contribution to the understanding of chronic pain and a spellbinding literary achievement.
The poems in Stephanie de Montalk's new collection engage with the world as if through a window - cloaked, distanced, guided by the movements of the seasons, the weather, and always, trees. As de Montalk seeks a cure to the life-changing limitations of her physical self, she finds something close to solace in dreaming.These poems are always evocative, mysterious, reaching towards the possibility and hope of healing.
Poet, polemicist, pagan, and pretender to the throne of Poland, Count Geoffrey Potocki de Montalk was one of the glittering generation of New Zealand poets of the 1930s. His career took a strange turn after he was imprisoned for obscene libel. Following a celebrated trial in London, he became increasingly eccentric, dressing in mock-medieval garb, claiming the throne of Poland, and issuing a stream of poetry and pamphlets, before returning to New Zealand in the 1980s and 1990s. This is the first time his full story has been told and it will be relevant to those interested in the literature of obscenity, the history of censorship, and private press publishing in the 20th century.
In these poems, Dr. Wang, an expert witness, presents testimony about the alchemy of everyday life with clarity and precision. The evidence is that, as long as the world is as round as an orange, ideas will form, words and stories will follow, and wonderful things will happen.
"Vivid Familiar is a book of journeys. At its centre is the astonishing ѵFeathers and Waxѫ, in which the housebound poet is taken away by an airship that pulls up at her kitchen window. Other poems explore the long journey of the early European settlers of New Zealand, notions of distance and belonging, dislocation and restraint. But equally important are the arrivals, and the 'vivid familiars' that sustain the spirit."--BOOK JACKET.
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The poems in Ithaca Island Bay Leaves: a mythistorima weave the mythic into the every day. Characters from Greek mythology appear in present-day Wellington, while the poet's grandparents and mother become characters in a magic-real mythology. This debut collection has been described by Stephanie de Montalk as alive 'with acute observation and insight, and the warmth of Vana Manasiadis's alluring, original poetic voice.'
1821. Alexander Pushkin is in exile in Bessarabia, Russia. Restless and depressed, he is spending a month in Odessa on leave. He recalls a visit, the previous year, to the palace of the Tatar khans where he saw a Fountain of Tears: a khan's monument to Maria Potocka, a Polish countess who died before he could persuade her to love him, and to the khan's own perpetual grief. Pushkin will soon immortalise Maria, the khan and the Fountain of Tears in his poema. The interwoven stories of the captive countess and the exiled poet take place on a day in Bakhchisary and Odessa respectively.
THE NATURE OF THINGS is a celebration of the relationship between poetry and the New Zealand landscape. It matches a wide range of poems, that in some way evoke or describe our landscape, with images from the pre-eminent New Zealand photographer Craig Potton. The poems have been selected and the introduction written by James Brown, one of New Zealand's leading contemporary poets THE NATURE OF THINGS includes work from many of the central figures of New Zealand poetry, both historical and contemporary, to create a hugely appealing, accessible and original anthology of New Zealand poetry.