Dear Friends,

You are warmly invited to the launch of Riemke Ensing’s new volume of poetry on Sunday 15 March, 2-4 pm at the Grey Lynn Library hall.

Riemke Ensing

Blue is a cracked vase in memory

Poems 2000–2025

Riemke Ensing’s Talking Pictures, Selected Poems (2000) revealed her to be a major New Zealand poet. Since then, numerous poems have appeared in journals and anthologies, and she has published three exquisite limited edition collections on handcraft presses: Storm Warning (2003), O Lucky Man (2009), and If only (2017), the latter two with craft printer Tara McLeod. This volume includes these three books along with more than sixty previously uncollected poems.

These intensely visual poems reveal the poet’s deep affinity for coastal locations such as Muriwai and Otago Harbour, and her profound response to the work of a number of artists and fellow writers, notably Charles Brasch, Colin McCahon, Kazu Nakagawa, Gerda Leenards, and Anna Caselberg, while others consider the migrant experience, ‘the trees in the forests of memories’, the connotations of ‘blue’.

This outstanding collection will be launched by Deborah Shepard, with readings by the poet, at the Grey Lynn Library Hall, 474 Great North Road, Grey Lynn, on Sunday 15 March between 2.00pm and 4.00pm.

Please RSVP to coldhub@gmail.com or 021 103 0382