Milk and Honey

By Michele Leggott

Milk & Honey is a dance to the music of that future time. It looks back and remembers. It looks forward and tries to see what will happen next. Its theatre is the world turning round and what can be saved each day from a life of the imagination. It builds tentative structures from smaller parts that come and go like thought itself. It is a lamentation, the universe as circus. It is a pattern of doors opening. It counts and it listens. It is a series of border-crossings between light and dark, old world and new, history and desire, body and soul, life and death, yes and no. It is a attempt on happiness, another search for the oh of transformation. It is in three parts with a gateway at either end. It can be read from the front or the back and there is seriousness but also songs along the way. Why is it called Milk & Honey? Because of a song. Why are there two clowns on the cover? Because one morning they were front-page news.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Auckland University Press
• Release date: Oct 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781869406691

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.