Things OK with you?

Know what a thing’s called, and we own it; if not,

there’s really only pointing, our still wishing

we knew. The afternoon wilts round its edges,

unless we’ve said it.

Things OK with you?  is Vincent O’Sullivan’s first collection of poems since Being Here: Selected Poems (2015) and And So It Is: New Poems (2016). His Selected Stories was published in 2019 and The Dark Is Light Enough: Ralph Hotere in 2020.

'Things OK with you?  offers stubbornness, beauty, shrugging, and deep satisfaction, but I think its soft-spoken tenderness is its most generous gift.' —Sophie van Waardernberg, Academy of NZ Literature

‘O’Sullivan’s new collection is a form of poetry as mesh. The poems and collection as a whole resemble a web, an interlacing of ideas, things, experiences, characters, musical fluencies, silences, humour, story, admissions.’ —Paula Green, Kete

Born in Auckland in 1937, Vincent O’Sullivan was the author of the novels Let the River Stand, Believers to the Bright Coast, and All This by Chance, which was shortlisted for the 2019 Acorn Prize for Fiction. He wrote many plays and collections of short stories and poems, was joint editor of the five-volume Letters of Katherine Mansfield, edited a number of major anthologies, and authored acclaimed biographies of John Mulgan and Ralph Hotere. He was made a Distinguished Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit in the 2000 Queen’s Birthday Honours and was the New Zealand poet laureate 2013–2015. 

Cover: Roman mosaic, Aquileia, 1st century AD
(Pasquale Sorrentino / Science Photo Library)