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Geoff Cochrane (1951–2022) was a poet and fiction writer who was born in Wellington and lived there almost all his life. The author of nineteen collections of poems, two novels, a novella, and two collections of short stories, he was the recipient of an Arts Foundation Laureate Award, presented as part of the 2014 Westpac New Zealand Arts Awards. He was awarded the Janet Frame Prize for Poetry in 2009, and the inaugural Nigel Cox Unity Books Award in 2010.
This Selected Poems presents the best of Geoff Cochrane's many published collections, from Aztec Noon (1992) to Chosen (2020).
''The best work of the late, prolific poet who saw things at ground level, gleaned from the 20 collections he wrote.' —NZ Listener Highlights of 2023
For me, Cochrane is in the very first row of New Zealand’s first-raters. . . . I remember every one of Cochrane’s collections with both pleasure and astonishment at the heights he scales in them.' —Guy Somerset, Aotearoa New Zealand Review of Books
'If you like your poetry full of jaded horrors and rare mercy, this impressive-looking book is the one to buy.' —Hamesh Wyatt, Otago Daily Times
‘Geoff Cochrane’s is a whole world, rendered in lines at once compressed and open, mysterious and approachable.’ —Damien Wilkins
‘Over the years, Cochrane’s work has been a joy to me, a solace, a proof that art can be made in New Zealand which shows ourselves in new ways.’ —Pip Adam
'Everyone reading local poetry has, or should have, a Geoff Cochrane moment, a blissful book in which they discover his compressed, “courtly” (as Damien Wilkins once described Geoff’s writing) poetry mined from his singularly Wellington life, past and present. . . . He was intense, committed, thoughtful, isolated and, in his own way, courageous.' —James Brown
'Would he break your heart, make you chuckle or tear you a new one – one never quite knew. . . . He had this way of creating a moment of meeting that elided everything else, a calm where all our antennae raised as one and you never knew what would come out of his mouth, or his work.' —Carl Shuker
Cover image: Denis O'Connor, 'Another Forever', after a poem by Geoff Cochrane, 2015. Courtesy Two Rooms Gallery.
