Winter Eyes

There’ll be time, we say; there’ll be time

to rewrite our part in the pantomime

to embrace the promise of the approaching rhyme

Poetry as comfort, poetry as confrontation. In Winter Eyes Harry Ricketts reaches into past and future, with other writers and artists – from Kipling to Dylan, Austen to Frame – in the crosscurrents. These are poems of friendship, of love’s stranglehold, of the streets and buildings where history played out. Elegiac and bittersweet, Winter Eyes is Harry Ricketts’ best yet.

Harry Ricketts teaches English literature and creative writing at Victoria University of Wellington. He has written and edited more than twenty-five books, including literary biographies, personal and critical essays, and poetry. His previous poetry collection is Half Dark (VUP, 2015).