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Published July 2011
This collection by award-winning poet Brian Turner develops themes characteristic of his poetry. Love poems and elegies keep company with poems of satire, protest and metaphysical speculation. The book concludes with 'Post-operative', a raw and risky sequence written in the wake of major surgery.
Ultimately, everything helps to map the contours of love, loss and longing that form the map of the human heart.
Brian Turner (1944–2025) was born in Dunedin and lived most of his life in Central Otago. His first book of poems, Ladders of Rain (1978), won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize and was followed by a number of highly praised poetry collections and award-winning writing in a wide range of genres, including journalism, biography, memoir and sports writing. Later poetry
collections included Night Fishing (2016), Inside Outside (2011) and Just This (winner of the New Zealand Post Book Award for Poetry in 2010). He was the Te Mata Estate New Zealand Poet Laureate 2003–05 and received the Prime Minister’s Award for Poetry in 2009.
