These intensely visual poems reveal the poet’s deep affinity for coastal locations such as Muriwai and Otago Harbour, and her profound response to the work of a number of artists and fellow writers, notably Charles Brasch, Colin McCahon, Kazu Nakagawa, Gerda Leenards, and Anna Caselberg, while others consider the migrant experience, ‘the trees in the forests of memories’, the connotations of ‘blue’.
Riemke Ensing’s Talking Pictures, Selected Poems (2000) showed her to be a major New Zealand poet. Since then, numerous poems have appeared in journals and anthologies, but she has published only three small collections in limited editions: Storm Warning (2003), O Lucky Man (2009), and If only (2017), the latter two with craft printer Tara McLeod. This volume includes these three books along with more than sixty previously uncollected poems.
‘Every word of it is crafted, poignant and precisely right. There is not even a shadow of a comma to spare.’ ––Kevin Ireland on ‘A different kind of Hemingway episode’, Riemke Ensing’s winning entry in the 2012 NZSA Kevin Ireland Poetry Competition.
About the Author :
Riemke Ensing was born in Groningen, The Netherlands, in 1939. With her parents she immigrated to New Zealand at the age of twelve in 1951. At this stage of her life she spoke no English. She went to school first in Dargaville, then to Ardmore Teachers’ Training College, after which she taught for two years, returning to the College to lecture in English literature for a year. She again became a fulltime student and on graduating M.A.(Hons) in 1967, was appointed as a tutor in the English Department at the University of Auckland, where she taught till 1999. She was then appointed an Honorary Research Fellow (Faculty of Arts) and in 2002 was a Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellow. Her poetry is represented extensively in anthologies and her work has appeared in many publications both in New Zealand and overseas. In 1977 she edited the pioneering anthology of New Zealand women's poetry, Private Gardens. Her poetry, art writings, and essays have been widely published in New Zealand and overseas. A selected poems, Talking Pictures, was published by HeadworX in 2000.
