Watching for the Wingbeat: new & selected 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.” Ex-NZ Poet Laureate has described Pat White's work as Vincent O’Sullivan has described Pat White's work as “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." 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from “Gnossienne” (previously available only as a limited edition publication); “From the Valdimar Notebooks”, a recent unpublished sequence of 43 keen-eyed short-poem observations of the natural world; and eleven additional new poems.

About the Author :
Pat White (1944–) is a poet, essayist, memoirist and artist whose work often directly reflects his interest in rural life and the natural environment. His first collection of poetry, Signposts, was published in 1977. Subsequent collections include Bushfall (1978); Cut Across the Grain(1980); Acts of Resistance (1985); Dark Backward (1994); Drought and Other Intimacies (1999); Planting the Olives (2004); & Fracking a & Hawk (2015)––collections that draw on his experience living in different places around New Zealand, from the bottom of the South Island to the far north. Pat White was the 2010 Writer in Residence at the historic Randell Cottage in Wellington, which resulted in the limited edition publication Gnossienne (Wai-te-ata Press 2012), with images by Catherine Day and French translations by Nadine Ribault. His collection of memoir essays, How the Land Lies: of longing and belonging, was published by VUP in 2010. His biography of poet Peter Hooper, Notes from the Margins: the West Coast’s Peter Hooper appeared in 2017. White graduated with an MA in Creative Writing from the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University in 2010. He also has an MFA from Massey University, Wellington, and both degrees enable him to explore `a sense of place’ – one through writing, the other through painting and sculpture. He takes part in the NZ Book Council's Writers in Schools programme.