The ten poets in this 25th edition hail from New Zealand, Australia, the UK and the USA. Without the support of poets from all over the world and the financial contributions from our sponsors we wouldn’t have reached this grand number. Sincere thanks to you all.
I’ll hope you’ll enjoy reading and rereading the poems in this summer card.
Introducing our summer poets
Billy Collins is an American poet, appointed as Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003 and selected as the New York State Poet for 2004-2006. Billy has described himself as “reader conscious”: “I have one reader in mind, someone who is in the room with me, and who I’m talking to, and I want to make sure I don’t talk too fast, or too glibly. Usually I try to create a hospitable tone at the beginning of a poem. Stepping from the title to the first lines is like stepping into a canoe. A lot of things can go wrong.”
Carolyn McCurdie is a Dunedin writer and the judge of this year’s Poems in the Waiting Room poetry competition. Her poems have been published widely in journals and on-line. She was the winner of the NZ Poetry Society’s International Competition 2013 and has previously won the Poems-in-Waiting-Rooms Best unplaced Dunedin poem, in 2012. Her short fiction won the Lilian Ida Smith Award in 1998 and a collection of short stories “Albatross” was published in e-book form by Rosa Mira Books in 2014. A children’s novel, “The Unquiet” was published by Longacre Press in 2006.
Diana Hendry grew up by the sea and has worked as a journalist, English teacher and tutor in Creative Writing at the University of Bristol. Her poetry has won a number of awards including first prize in the 1996 Housman Society Competition. She was Writer in Residence at Dumfries & Galloway Royal Infirmary 1997-1998 and she was a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the University of Edinburgh 2008-2010. She lives in Edinburgh. She has published six collections of poetry.
Harry Ricketts teaches English literature and creative writing at Victoria University of Wellington. His twenty-five books include literary biographies, personal essays and nine collections of poems. His most recent collection is Just Then (VUP, 2012). He was the featured poet in recent issues of Poetry New Zealand and Takahe.
James Carter is one of the most high-profile children’s poets in the UK today. A prize/award winning poet, his many books include Journey To The Centre Of My Brain (Macmillan), Orange Silver Sausage (Walker Books) and I’m A Little Alien! and Hey, Little Bug! (both Francis Lincoln). James travels all over the UK (with his guitar, Keith) to give lively poetry performances and workshops. Over the last fifteen years, James has also written six widely used and critically-acclaimed creative writing books for teachers . Find him, read him, hear him here
Linda Connell has published two books of poetry, ‘Laughing With the Undertaker’ and ‘Guarding the Cellar Door’. After years spent dividing her time between Florida and New Zealand, she settled with her husband permanently in Christchurch in good time for the earthquakes. Her life is filled these days with a passion for gardening, reading, coffeeing, and caring part-time for her toddler granddaughter.
Pat White is a poet and essayist who lives in Fairlie. His first collection of poetry, Signposts, was published in 1977, and he has since published a range of collections that draw on his experience living in different places around New Zealand. Pat was the 2010 Writer in Residence at the historic Randell Cottage in Wellington. Read more about Pat here
Paul Muldoon is an Irish poet and professor of poetry, as well as an editor, critic, and translator. After studying at Queen’s University, Belfast, where Seamus Heaney was a tutor and where he met other Belfast Group poets such as Michael Longley, he published his first book, New Weather (Faber) in 1973, at the age of 21. From 1973 he worked as a producer for the BBC in Belfast until, in the mid-1980’s, he gave up his job to become a freelance writer and moved to the United States with his second wife, the American novelist Jean Hanff Korelitz. He now lives in New York City.
Peter Bakowski is a Melbourne poet, and the author of five collections of poetry. He is constantly on the road, presenting his work at readings and in workshops. Read an interesting interview with Peter here
Roy Marshall was born in 1966. He has had numerous jobs including delivery driver, gardener and coronary care nurse. His first pamphlet of poems, Gopagilla, was published in 2012, and a full collection, The Sun Bathers, is published by Shoestring Press. Roy lives in Leicestershire, UK.
Twenty five editions of Poems in the Waiting Room poetry cards.
To celebrate our 25th edition we’re moving northwards again. 37 GP practices and 29 Rest Homes in the Mid Central area of the North Island have been sent copies of the summer edition. So now we supply 420 GP practices, 261 Rest Homes, 8 prisons, and 4 hospices. We are another step closer to our long-term aim of distributing the cards throughout New Zealand.
Poems in the Waiting Room (NZ) 