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It’s getting colder as the flames
rise from the bonfires, real and virtual.
See how they flicker in the darkling air.
What is happiness in a suddenly unfamiliar world? What happens to us once the old connections spark and disappear? With his characteristic humanity, intelligence and humour, Harry Ricketts writes of youth, hope, books and writers, and the friendships through which we come to know ourselves. Included in this new book are poems about finding one’s way through a world altered by loss, and the magical thinking that sustains us.
Harry Ricketts is a poet and literary scholar and has published around 30 books. He has lived in Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand, since 1981. Until his retirement in 2022, he was a professor in the English Programme at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington. His books include the internationally acclaimed The Unforgiving Minute: A Life of Rudyard Kipling (1999) and Strange Meetings: The Lives of the Poets of the Great War (2010). His recent books include the poetry collections Winter Eyes (2018) and Selected Poems (2021), and the memoir First Things (2024). With historian David Kynaston, he is the co-author of Richie Benaud’s Blue Suede Shoes: The Story of an Ashes Classic (Bloomsbury, 2024).
Cover (woodcut): Dave Kent
Cover (design): Todd Atticus
