Mark Pirie

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

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

June 2020 sees the delayed release (due to COVID-19 lockdown) of the selected poems of Mary Maringikura Campbell through my publishing company HeadworX: Yellow Moon | E Marama Rengarenga: Selected Poems. 

I have known of Maringikura’s work for many years and always thought it deserved to be better known and read by a wider audience. I was very pleased to get the opportunity to publish her book. 

I edited and arranged the book in two sections. The first part is poems uncollected and new, 1970s-2019, and the second part is a reprint of her first booklet Maringi (2015), which was edited for Maringikura by Andrew Campbell.

The book contains all the poems that Maringikura has wished to retain in print, and comes with a foreword by renowned writer Apirana Taylor.

She is a daughter of the well known poets Alistair Te Ariki Campbell and Meg Campbell.

Here's the link:
https://headworx.co.nz/poetry/yellow

The latest issue of my journal broadsheet, no.25, May 2020, features the Auckland poet Janet Charman, a former national book award winner for her poetry collection cold snack.

The issue gives a lively selection of Janet Charman's recent poetry.

It's nice to feature a poet who has been a leading New Zealand poet and feminist critic for many years.

Others included were: Serie Barford, Richard Berengarten (UK), Walter Charman (1912-1991), Piers Davies, Belinda Diepenheim, Amanda Eason, Margaret Jeune, Helen Rickerby, Ila Selwyn, Elizabeth Smither, Kate Waterhouse and F W N (Niel) Wright.

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