Hera Lindsay Bird

Winner of the Jessie Mackay Best First Book Award for Poetry 2017

this impressive debut has established Hera Lindsay Bird as a good girl………with many beneficial thoughts and feelings………

with themes as varied as snow and tears, the poems in this collection shine with the fantastic cream of who she is………juxtaposing many classical and modern breezes

Bird turns her prescient eye on love and loss, and what emerges is like a helicopter in fog………or a bejewelled Christmas sleigh, gliding triumphantly through the contemporary aesthetic desert………

this is at once an intelligent and compelling fantasy of tenderness………

heartbreaking and charged with trees………without once sacrificing the forest………

Whether you are masturbating luxuriously in your parents' sleepout………

………or pushing a pork roast home in a vintage pram………

this is the book for you………………………

heroically and compulsively stupid………………………………………

………………………………………whipping you once again into medieval sunlight. 

Hera Lindsay Bird has been the fastest selling, most popular book of poetry that Victoria University Press (now Te Herenga Waka University Press), and probably New Zealand, has ever published. 

Cover photograph: Russell Kleyn