Us, Then

Winner of the poetry category of the 2014 NZ Post Book Awards

'Us, Then combines his trademark vernacular feel, with a warm, personal touch.'
—Hamesh Wyatt, Otago Daily Times, June 2013.

‘O’Sullivan is a witty, intellectual poet and these are poems full of story, full of detail. Auden talks about poetry as “memorable speech” – that’s what these poems are. I love the life in these poems. Recommended!’
—Harry Ricketts on Further Convictions Pending

'You’re just a few pages in when you know you’re in the company of a master. The poems are so meaty, so pithy, so well crafted, so damned good.’
—Nicholas Reid on The Movie May Be Slightly Different

‘one of the outstanding books of poems of the decade’
—Kevin Ireland on Seeing You Asked

‘There is a kind of luminous spirituality about O’Sullivan’s poetry, that long after you have read the poems, continues to reside in the objects or situations the poems describe.’
—Anna Jackson on Lucky Table

‘The poems shimmer with skill and vigour . . . With this collection his reputation as one of New Zealand’s foremost living literary figures takes another step forward.’
—Paul Thompson on Nice Morning For It, Adam

‘Blame Vermeer is the real thing, wise beyond the attitudes of wisdom, deft beyond the posturing of deftness, brimming with O’Sullivan’s exciting ability simply to talk his understated way into sheer bloody poetry.’
—Michael Hulse on Blame Vermeer

Vincent O’Sullivan (1937–2024) was one of New Zealand’s leading writers. He is the author of the novels Let the River Stand, Believers to the Bright Coast, and All This by Chance. He wrote many plays and collections of short stories and poems, and his poetry collection Us, Then won the poetry category of the 2014 NZ Post Book Awards. He was joint editor of the five-volume Letters of Katherine Mansfield, and edited a number of major anthologies. In 1994 he was the Meridian Energy Katherine Mansfield Fellow in Menton, France. He was made a Distinguished Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit in the 2000 Queens Birthday Honours and was the New Zealand poet laureate 2013–2015.