Mirabile Dictu

By Michele Leggott

In 2008 Michele Leggott wrote a poem a week to record her term as the inaugural New Zealand Poet Laureate. In her collection of poems Mirabile Dictu (amazing to say), she relates the wonders of those 12 months, which took her to Matahiwi Marae in Hawke's Bay to receive her brilliant sky-blue, specially carved tokotoko, Te Kikorangi; through a time of mourning for and celebration of former poet laureate Hone Tuwhare; to Florence, across a 'poetic bridge'; and to Wellington 'hand to hand' with four other laureates. With her is Te Kikorangi as guide and companion - 'almost as good as the blue from Kapiti / we eat when the good times roll'. Leggott also delves back into the past, layering poems of today with poems of then - and finds, among others, Isabella - growing up in a colonial town, 'named for a grandmother over the sea'. The poems in Mirabile Dictu are gifts; they are lush and supple; they glory in language; they go 'looking for a good time' and find rose cuttings, great-aunts, an elephant, several feasts, adorations and assumptions - 'the breathing world'. Through the poems Leggott explores languages within languages, hearing and seeing, coming and going, the porousness of experience and its representations. In this collection she is a daily traveller, crafter of words and maker of fire.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Auckland University Press
• Release date: Oct 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781869406196

Michele Leggott

Michele Leggott was the inaugural New Zealand Poet Laureate 2007-2009 and received the Prime Minister's Award for Literary Achievement in Poetry in 2013. She is the author of nine books of poetry, including, Vanishing Points, Heartland, Mirabile Dictu and Journey to Portugal. Leggott's latest work, Mezzaluna: Selected Poems published in 2020, gathers poems from all nine of her previous collections. Leggott lives in Auckland, where she teaches in the English Department at the University of Auckland.