New Book!
Poems & Images
Poems & Images is what it says on its striking cover: Rabbitt’s ‘spare, elegant, and, occasionally biting’, collected verse is published in concert with his visual work, made up of a ‘quirky’ type catalogue from the 1980s; 12 colourful typographic images, first exhibited in the 1990s; and 14 of his relatively recent photographs curated into a layered essay. The poems originate from his three ‘little’ books from the 1980s: the edgy upagainstit; the collaborative On The Line, with Rabbitt’s poem sequence meditating on the line interwoven with artist Jane Pountney’s deft line drawings; the psychosexual thewayofit, also with Pountney’s line drawings; followed over three decades later by the ‘impressive’ Prayers for the Living and the Dead, 2021, with drawings by artist Bodhi Vincent; and new and previously unpublished works. Poems & Images was edited by acclaimed New Zealand author and Lasavia
Publishing Ltd’s co-founder Mike Johnson, who provides a critical reading of Rabbitt’s body of work in his comprehensive introduction.
‘Lindsay Rabbitt’s work is austere and uncompromising, yet warm; empathetic yet wry; tough yet tender. […] In these poems you can feel language as a physical force, primal utterance, language as emergence. Their openness brings the reader in as a co-creator, sharer of the poet’s discoveries, participants in the poems’ enactments.’
Mike Johnson
‘Lindsay Rabbitt’s photographs have the simplicity and the concision of his poems; as well as their mysterious resonance […] these images are enigmas which, when deciphered, do not lose their enigmatic quality. Rather, their power is augmented.’
Martin Edmond
Published by 99% Press,
an imprint of Lasavia Publishing Ltd
in association with Voice Press
A5, colour images, 206pp
Price: $37 including postage
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email: [email protected]
This month’s poem
PASTICHE
The cosmic tribe’s shopping for images
At the Galactic Supermarket:
Geoff Cochrane’s grinning at a baby,
While Leonard Cohen charms its mother.
By the fruit and veg Nick Cave’s
Chatting with Marianne Faithfull,
And lo . . . here comes the Maori Jesus
Rapping the song of himself in te reo.
On the bus I catch the Ratana Brass Band
Playing outside a halfway house on Rimu Road;
Getting off I’m greeted by the ghost of Hemi
Baxter, his face wrinkled with the tribal smile.
From New Poems, Poems & Images
