Book Launch - Harry Ricketts: Selected Poems

Unity Books and Victoria University Press warmly invite you to celebrate the launch of 'Selected Poems' by Harry Ricketts. All welcome.

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About the Book
Harry Ricketts has written and edited more than thirty books, but it is his poetry that has been the most constant, and the most personal in tone. From his 1989 collection Coming Here – in which he wrote the first of his ‘Secret Life’ poems – to his 2018 collection Winter Eyes, which reviewer Tim Upperton called ‘unsettling, moving, both estranging and empathetic’, Ricketts has written of friendship, youth, romance, loss, and the small moments that carry a lifelong weight, or light, within us. His voice is recognisable for its humility, intelligence and warmth. In Selected Poems, its full range is represented for the first time.

‘Harry Ricketts brings out into the sunlight the lumber stored in the attic of his mind. He clocks both the psychological distance between people here and the paradoxical sense of closeness in a lonely land.’ —David Eggleton, NZ Review of Books

‘The poems are the heartbeat of a backward look; at times mourning, often contemplative, they revel in humour as much as intimacy, in sumptuous detail as much as the well-tended gap.’ —Paula Green, NZ Poetry Shelf

About the Author
Harry Ricketts teaches English literature and creative writing at Victoria University of Wellington. He is a literary scholar, biographer, essayist, reviewer, editor and poet. His publications include the internationally acclaimed The Unforgiving Minute: A Life of Rudyard Kipling (1999) and Strange Meetings: The Lives of the Poets of the Great War (2010). His previous collection of poetry is Winter Eyes (2018).