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Lyrical Ballads

  • ISBN-13: 9781800175440
  • Publisher: CARCANET PRESS
    Imprint: CARCANET PRESS
  • By Bill Manhire
  • Price: AUD $33.99
  • Stock: 0 in stock
  • Availability: Book will be despatched upon release.
  • Local release date: 01/06/2026
  • Format: Paperback (216.00mm X 135.00mm) 96 pages Weight: 0g
  • Categories: Poetry by individual poets [DCF]
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Bill Manhire has always subscribed to Paul Valerys definition of poetry as a prolonged hesitation between sound and sense. In that spirit, many of the poems in this new, dazzling collection blend story and song, and do so using everyday words and phrases that - suddenly, on the page - become new and delightfully weird.

Lyrical Ballads is a many-peopled collection: the baffled inhabitants of Every Street and Intermediate Street are here, while Dracula, T.S. Eliot and Bobby Outram from Outram have walk-on parts. The collection is anchored by two long sequences that embrace awkwardness, mystery and absurdity: The Tobacco Tin, a kind of folk story riding along on its own lacunae, and Tell You What, a set of curmudgeonly opinions that evoke the prejudices of a fast-vanishing world.

As they notice the small collisions between wonder and everyday reality, and the trajectories of those who dont fit easily in this world, these poems close in on the darker certainties of our lives.

Bill Manhire was born in Invercargill, New Zealand in 1946. He was his countrys inaugural Poet Laureate and has won the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry four times. He headed the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University of Wellington, establishing and directing the universitys prestigious creative writing programme.His volume of short fiction, South Pacific, was published by Carcanet in 1994. His poetry collections include Lifted (2007), and his Collected Poems (2001) and Selected Poems (2014). In 2018, he was made one of the Arts Foundation Icon Artists, an award given to only 20 living artists for their lifetime achievement and contribution to the arts in NZ.

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