The Lifeguard: Poems 2008–2013

By Ian Wedde

Ian Wedde's latest collection of poems are a complex mix of rhapsody, fear, and humor, and the prose explore the contradictions between life's pool-side surfaces and frightening undertows. Opening with a major new series of poems The Lifeguard, it concludes with another long sequence, Shadow Stands Up, in which a world of Platonic memory and tidal recurrence is observed from a window-seat in Auckland's conspicuously green-branded Link bus. Bringing together work from the past five years by one of New Zealand's most outstanding contemporary poets, this collection shows a master of the are at his thoughtful and surprising best.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Nov 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781775586500

Ian Wedde

Ian Wedde is the author of sixteen collections of poetry, seven novels, two collections of essays, a collection of short stories, a monograph on the artist Bill Culbert, several art catalogues, a memoir, and has been co-editor of two poetry anthologies. His work has been widely anthologised, and has appeared in journals nationally and internationally. Wedde won the New Zealand Book Award for Fiction for his first novel, Dick Seddon’s Great Dive (1976), and a New Zealand Book Award for his poetry collection Spells for Coming Out (1977). He was the Robert Burns Fellow at the University of Otago in 1972, the Victoria University Writing Fellow in 1984, the Katherine Mansfield Fellow in Menton in 2005, and the University of Auckland Michael King Writer in Residence in 2009. In 2010 Wedde was awarded an ONZM in the Queen’s Birthday Honours, and in 2011 was made New Zealand Poet Laureate. He was awarded the Creative New Zealand Writer’s Residency in Berlin in 2013–14, and in 2014 received the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement (poetry). Between 1994 and 2004 Wedde was head of art and visual culture at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa; more recently he has been an adjunct senior lecturer in the departments of Art History and English at The University of Auckland and is now an independent curator and critic.

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