O yes, it’s true, the echoes live here
and everywhere

here in the cracked sun and concrete heat
but also in the steep creek
where the blind vines get you by the throat,
the rotten wood collapses in its heart as you touch,
and the mossed rocks slither under your feet


from ‘Echoes’

Sarah Broom’s poetry profoundly engages the landscape of her native NewZealand. Experienced as both nurturing and menacing, tender andindifferent, it is the context within which other terrains areexplored: heightened states of awareness, the physical extremes ofillness, the drifts and tides of close relationships, the complexitiesof motherhood. Intensely conscious of death, her poetry is fiercelyattached to life and love.

It’s hard to believe that such amature and fully-fledged collection is also the author’s first. A bookfor our times; specifically a woman’s, and more specifically, amother’s book, it is ‘about time that wears / as ragged as storm-blownwings’. Poems of deep poignancy and unflinching tenderness arepresented against a backdrop of encroaching tidescape in which a fiercebeauty burns all the more brightly, the more it is threatened. - Medbh McGuckian

Cover painting: John Walsh, Tangata Whenua (detail). Reproduced by kind permissionof the artist. Cover design StephenRaw.com


Interview: Sarah Broom talks to Ryan van Winkle for the Scottish Poetry Library. She reads from and discusses Tigers at Awhitu, including how it was put together and how her diagnosis with lung cancer affected the tone of the last part of the collection. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser.

Email: splpodcast@gmail.com
Twitter @anonpoetry and @byleaveswelive.


Click here to hear Sarah Broom interviewed on New Zealand radio.

Click here to hear New Zealand poet Sam Hunt enthusing about Sarah Broom's work.