This is Mark's blog.
The Night Press, a division of HeadworX my publishing company, has just brought out a small printed edition of cat poems by Margaret Jeune, Cat World. Written over many years, it conveys her personal experiences as a cat owner and carer.
The book contains some poems I omitted from her recent career-spanning, Selected Poems. Put together the poems form a neat sequence on the subject of cats.
In March 2021, my publishing company HeadworX released the Selected Poems of Margaret Jeune in hardback.
I personally edited/compiled the book, some 270 pages, from Margaret's previously published collections with HeadworX along with 51 uncollected poems from the pages of Tony Chad's poetry magazine Valley Micropress along with a section of new and uncollected poems. The book is the first to present Jeune's work in chronological order from 1968-2020.
I am very pleased to include this title in the HeadworX New Poetry Series.
For more details on the book, please visit the HeadworX website:
Selected Poems by Margaret Jeune
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/
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