Paula Green

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Paula Green is a poet, reviewer, anthologist, children’s author, book-award judge and blogger. She has published eight poetry collections including several for children. ‘There is,’ The Otago Daily Times wrote of her poetry collection The Baker’s Thumbprint, ‘a glowing, throbbing beauty in this one. This little book seems to pulse with warmth and sense of calm, comfort and joy. Green this time around has blown open the doors and taken an endless rainbow of excitement and imagination. All the way through you think, “Wow, wonder what’s coming next?” Green once said “There is a magical reaction between something I see, hear, experience, feel or remember and the words in my head. In that magical moment, I find the seeds of a poem. And it is of course completely unpredictable.” The Baker’s Thumbprint is neat.’ Co-written with Harry Ricketts, her book 99 Ways into New Zealand Poetry was short-listed for the 2010 NZ Post Book Awards. She runs two blogs: NZ Poetry Box and NZ Poetry Shelf. She edited the much lauded A Treasury of New Zealand Poetry for Children (Random House). Her latest collection, The Letter Box Cat and other poems(Scholastic) won Children’s Choice at the 2015 NZ Book Awards. Paula has a Doctorate in Italian and was Literary Fellow at The University of Auckland (2005). She is a regular guest in New Zealand Literary festivals and performs and undertakes workshops in schools from Year 0-13. Her new adult collection, New York Pocket Book was published in June 2016 by Seraph Press. She is currently writing a book on NZ women’s poetry.

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Auckland

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A New York Pocket Book (2016)

You need the right person beside the right tree in the right light in the right city and this is love. — ‘Listening to Frank O’Hara’ Paula Green turns her thoughtfulness and linguistic playfulness in a new direction in her latest collection. This reflective meander around a new city – the Big Apple – is part travelogue, part essay on the nature of poetry.

A Treasury of NZ Poems for Children (2014)

Bursting with wonderful poems that will make you laugh, cry, jiggle and ponder, A Treasury of NZ Poems for Children makes poetry sing for a new generation. This dazzling collection includes heritage poets such as Margaret Mahy, Hone Tuwhare, James K Baxter and Janet Frame, beloved children’s authors such as Joy Cowley, Gavin Bishop, Tessa Duder and Kyle Mewburn, national treasures such as Bill Manhire, Elizabeth Smither and Peter Bland, and an exciting bunch of new poets. New Zealand poet Paula Green went hunting for poems and Jenny Cooper’s magical illustrations bring them to life.

Dear Heart: 150 New Zealand Love Poems (2012)

Love - that complicated, delicious, pleasurable, necessary feeling ties us to another human, to a mother, father, son, daughter, sibling, lover or friend. Love can also tie us to a place, an experience, an object. We love and we are loved; unexpectedly, gloriously, painfully, deeply. The majority of the 150 New Zealand love poems selected by anthologist Paula Green for this gorgeous collection reveal adult love - from the sparks of youth to the changing nature of love in old age - but she has also included examples of the love of offspring (Janet Charman's warm loaf), of particular places (Brian Turner and the Maniototo Plains) and of beloved objects (James Brown's bicycle). 'I have arranged the poems as though I were composing a symphony rather than sticking to a chronological rule, because I wanted poetic music along with poetic heart. Now it is over to the reader to explore the different echoes, the unexpected juxtapositions, the contours of tone, the historical links and disconnections, the contemporary exposures.' This outstanding anthology, beautifully packaged with illustrations by leading New Zealand artists, serves as an introduction to the work of this country's finest modern poets.