Selected Poems

Bland Peter

In the twelve years since Peter Bland's last collection, "The Crusoe Factor", was published by London Magazine "Editions", the poet has not been idle. Setting the best of his earlier work, long unavailable, beside a full volume of new poems, he lets us in on forty years' poetry. We follow him from Scarborough in the 1930s to Wellington in the artistically vibrant 1950s, to contemporary narratives set in Britain and in New Zealand. Allen Curnow praises Bland's "sense of the centuries past or passing show", and the critic Kevin Ireland writes: "few contemporary poets are more strikingly visual or have greater graphic energy".

Christopher Hope in the London Magazine noted Bland's "unnerving sense of the world out of kilter" and his "considerable comic gift". Bland's example helped establish a new urban subject matter in New Zealand in the early 1960s. Since his return to London, his narratives of exile and displacement speak a wide range of vernaculars with great subtlety.

About the Author

Born in Scarborough in 1934, Peter Bland emigrated to New Zealand at the age of 20 and read English at the Victoria University of Wellington. He worked as a talks producer for the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation. He published his first book of poems in 1964 and became closely associated with the Wellington Group which included James K. Baxter and Louis Johnson. He worked as an editor and in theatre, returning to Britain in 1970 where his books were published by London Magazine Editions. He received a Cholmondeley Award in 1977.

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