Author(s): Janet Frame

World poetry

'The sweet daily bread of language. Smell it rising in its given warmth taste it through the stink of tears and yesterdays and eat it anywhere with any angel in sight.' Janet Frame used to keep geese, using the base of an old garden fountain as their bath. In later years the geese went but the bath was brought indoors as a receptacle into which Janet piled her poems and jottings as she reworked and developed them. Over time the goose bath overflowed with paper, including hundreds of unpublished poems. By the time Janet died she had named her hoped-for but elusive new selection "The Goose Bath". From this treasure trove, Pamela Gordon, Denis Harold and Bill Manhire have selected over a hundred poems that illustrate the shape of her life: her childhood and the subsequent difficult years in mental hospitals; her travels around the world; her life as a writer and return to New Zealand; and growing older and facing illness and death. The poems reveal her love for words, for cats, for the changing seasons, the arts and for this country. There are love poems, meditations on mortality, flashes of humour and startling imagery. And always she celebrates the power of the human imagination. This selection is beautiful and thought-provoking, a lasting legacy from one of this country's most acclaimed writers.