Salt Quilt

Salt Quilt is a portrait of an uneasy stretch of time. The poet looks back at various episodes of her life and then far ahead, to other lives and ways of seeing. She sheds cynicism, celebrates some constraints and rejects others, and keeps rewriting the endings. Poetry has saved her more than once. On the inside maybe she is becoming a 1980s self-help guy.

Many of these poems are a lyric archive of the times and places that still hold their charge. Many are about the aliveness of things we take for granted. Out of the wild medley of experience, and all of this living, dying and losing, comes something fertile and growing. 

The result is a stunning work that is fully present, sharp-witted and self-aware. 

Praise for Airini Beautrais 

‘Beautrais writes with a luminous, matter-of-fact intelligence about life’s disappointments, and also life’s consolations . . . with a level of care and attention that is in its own way a kind of liberation.’ —Noelle McCarthy

Airini Beautrais was born in Auckland in 1982. Her debut work of fiction, Bug Week, won Aotearoa New Zealand’s top fiction award, the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize, at the 2021 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. She is the author of four collections of poetry, including Secret Heart (2006), which won the Jessie Mackay Award for First Book of Poetry at the 2007 Montana New Zealand Book Awards, and the essay collection The Beautiful Afternoon (2024). In 2016 she won the Landfall Essay Prize. She lives in Whanganui.

Cover: Quilt made by Kathleen Lockett, c. 1930, photographed by Kathy Greensides, Te Puni Tiaki Taonga o Whanganui | Whanganui Regional Museum 
Design: Todd Atticus