New and Selected Poems

by Lauris Dorothy Edmond

A collection of poems dealing with such topics as middle age, the loss of a friend, and life

Genres: Poetry

216 pages, Paperback

First published February 18, 1993

About the author

Trained as a teacher, Lauris Edmond raised a family before publishing the poetry she had privately written throughout her life. Following her first book, 'In Middle Air,' written in 1975, she published many volumes of poetry, a novel, an autobiography (Hot October, 1989) and several plays. Her Selected Poems (1984) won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize.

Edmond wrote poetry throughout her life but decided to publish her first collection of verse, In Middle Air, only in 1975, at the age of 51. The work was awarded the PEN Best First Book Award for 1975.

She began her editorial activities in 1979, and in 1980 published a selection of poems by Chris Ward. In 1981 she edited the letters of A.R.D. Fairburn (1904–1957), a noted New Zealand poet of an earlier generation. It was a bold move on her part as the writer in question was not known for his progressive views, but the publication established her as an all‑round woman of letters.

At the same time, Edmond received the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellowship, which enabled her to stay in the south of France for several months. Her first work of prose was 'High Country Weather,' a book billed as a novel though in fact an extended short‑story of a deeply biographical character, telling — however veiledly — the story of her own incompatible marriage to Trevor Edmond (1920–1990); it was published in 1984, at about the time of her real‑life marriage’s dissolution. The feminist awakening marked by that book was sustained in a collection of other women’s ‘stories’ published under her co‑editorship two years later. As Janet Wilson wrote in the Guardian, ‘She was friend to several generations of women, especially writers, who admired her as a pioneer for breaking with social convention and carving out a successful literary life at a time when this seemed risky’.

In 1985 Lauris Edmond won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for her Selected Poems. The following year she was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire for services to literature in the 1986 Queen's Birthday Honours.

Additionally, in 1987 she received the Lilian Ida Smith Award from PEN New Zealand; in 1988 New Zealand’s Massey University awarded her an honorary D.Litt. degree; and in 1999 she received the A.W. Reed Award for Contribution to New Zealand Literature from Booksellers New Zealand, an industry association in Wellington, New Zealand. After her death a biennial poetry prize was established in her name at the initiative of the Canterbury Poets Collective and the New Zealand Poetry Society, the Lauris Edmond Memorial Award for Poetry, the first prize having been awarded (posthumously) at the Christchurch Arts Festival to the late poet Bill Sewell in 2003.

Her poetry, which continues to influence New Zealand writers, was not all about daffodils; she could speak with a committed voice, as is evidenced in the poem "Nuclear Bomb Test, Mururoa Atoll," which begins:

I am water I am sand
I am a cell in the trembling earth
I am a shaken pebble on the hurt sea floor
a young fish made ill by the predator poison
coursing towards me across the ocean
that was my friend...

Although in life she stayed as far away as was possible from all forms of organized religion, in death her quotations do apparently find their way into various church settings in New Zealand, a proof — if one be needed — of their deep innate spirituality.

Lauris Edmond died unexpectedly at her home in Wellington’s Oriental Bay on the morning of 28 January 2000. A friend arriving for dinner that evening discovered her body. She was 75, the mother of six children, five of them daughters, one of whom (Rachel, the fourth child) committed suicide in 1975 (the event is dealt with, poetically, in Edmond’s poem-sequence 'Wellington Letter']). Her only son, Martin Edmond (b. 1952), is also a writer.

Reviews

[Jenny (Reading Envy)]

I read Edmond's poetry as part of my New Zealand November project in 2015. I had already read the first volume of her autobiography, Hot October: An Autobiographical Story, but nothing in it intersected with the publication of these poems. In fact, she did not start publishing her poetry until the age of 51!

This collection pulls in selected poems from previously published volumes and a bunch of new poems. They range in topic from domesticity to despair to desire. Apart from a few inspired by her travels to other places (and meeting other poets), most of them are very specifically placed in New Zealand (I have never read another book of poems where the morepork was mentioned at all much less more than once.)



I marked a few favorites:

-Latter Day Lysistrata
"...I have no way to conceive
the dark maelstrom where men may spin
savage currents of power - is it
power? - and urn to stone, to steel...
Let us weep for these men, for
ourselves, let us cry out as they bend
over their illustrious equations; let us
tell them the cruel truth of bodies,
skin's velvet bloom, the scarlet of
bleeding. Let us show them the vulnerable
earth...."

-At the Gate of Number 89
"I think a city's spirit is always a woman,
long tried, grown old in the rain and rust,
the brawling winds of the street, knowing
that all that's alive can be bruised
and flung like a dog to the dark; but that
each morning, scuffing the dirty pathways
of being, comes again the indesructible
new born thing...."

-Prayer to Cydippe, Priestess to Hera
"never suppose as I reach towards
the morning I have deserved
its strange and reckless shining...."

-The Hour
"...Love surely
is accommodations, struggle,
rages understood and survived,
a forgiving wisdom -

yes, true. But even failed lovers are permitted
their moments ...."

And of course, the very moving Wellington Letter a long form poem written to her daughter Rachel after she committed suicide.