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This is Mark's blog.

Mark Pirie's poems published in Katherine Mansfield Studies (UK)

Two of my poems are included in volume no. 12 of the series Katherine Mansfield Studies.

It is a distinguished scholarly journal published by Edinburgh University Press and is an honour to be included.

My poems celebrate Mansfield, an author I have been an admirer of since student days. The issue acknowledges it has been 100 years since the publication of Mansfield’s Bliss and Other Stories, one of my favourite Modernist short story collections.

The issue was edited Enda Duffy, Gerri Kimber and Todd Martin, eminent Mansfield scholars.

broadsheet 26 features Andrew Fagan

The latest issue of my journal broadsheet, no.26, November 2020, features the Auckland poet and singer/songwriter Andrew Fagan, a former lead singer of the 1980s group The Mockers and an accomplished sailor and ocean navigator.

The issue prints for the first time 11 of Fagan's poems from his 2018 Spoken Word CD, it was always going to be like this.

I have published Fagan's poetry since 1998 in The NeXt Wave (OUP) and it's great to be able to publish some of his more recent poetry again. He continues to build a significant body of poetry and song lyrics.

Others included were: Peter Bland, Mary Maringikura Campbell, Laura Chalar (Uruguay), Bill Direen, David Eggleton, Karyn Hay, Alex Jeune, Bill Manhire, Annie Newcomer (USA), Michael O'Leary, Alistair Paterson, myself and Ron Riddell.

Here's the link:
http://broadsheetnz.wordpress.com

Mark Pirie co-authors an anthology of lockdown poetry

June 2020 saw the release of an anthology of national lockdown poems by myself, Alex Jeune and Margaret Jeune. 

I put together the sequence from our poems written during the COVID-19 national lockdown period, March to May 2020, in New Zealand.

The book gives three differing perspectives by New Zealand poets on the global crisis and is our personal responses to it. Our book is not meant to speak for everyone’s thoughts and feeling during the lockdown period in New Zealand. We hope it gives an affirming sense to readers of what we have all been through and endured during the lockdown in New Zealand.

It is published in the relaunched ESAW Mini Series (No. 39).

Here's the link to the publisher's blog:

https://michaeloleary.wordpress.com/2020/07/16/esaw-publishes-lockdown-mini-book/

HeadworX publishes new books by Ron Riddell and a Three Poets anthology

In the first half of 2020, my publishing company HeadworX released two new poetry books: The Wanderer by Ron Riddell and a Three Poets anthology, featuring Alex Jeune, Margaret Jeune and Marion Rego.

Ron Riddell’s poem The Wanderer is a book-length poem sequence and this is book one, being its first instalment. I have known Ron Riddell for many years since working with him and his wife Saray Torres de Riddell on the Wellington International Poetry Festival, 2003-2005. Bob Orr writes of it: “What a poem… Reading it I had the sense of being increasingly spellbound, of being transported to a place I’d previously not known about. Its repetitions had a hypnotic effect on me – it was like a music that returns to a coda at intervals along the way… a kind of extended Gregorian chant or a jazz musician’s riff open to endless interpretation.”

Three Poets brings together poets who have known each other over a long period of time in the Horowhenua. Marion Rego is already known as a children’s writer and the author of a memoir, Africa for One. Margaret Jeune has had published several poetry books with HeadworX and The Night Press in 2019. Alex Jeune is an emerging Wellington poet and this is his first publication in book form.

It's great to publish these titles in the HeadworX New Poetry Series.

For more details on each book, please visit the HeadworX website:

The Wanderer by Ron Riddell

https://headworx.co.nz/poetry/wanderer

Three Poets by Marion Rego, Alex Jeune and Margaret Jeune

https://headworx.co.nz/poetry/three