Three Regrets and a Hymn to Beauty: paperback - Tapa blanda

Wedde's work always brims with life as well as learning and his poems are meticulously crafted, his books beautifully constructed. The long poem or sequence has always been a natural vehicle and you could also say his entire corpus is so closely interconnected that he continues to write one long discursive poem. Here he gives us five extended poems that lope along in a wonderfully relaxed and rhythmic way exploring the concept of beauty and the nature of language. These are serious philosophic topics and Wedde sees them that way but he writes with such zest and energy, uses such a range of references and echoes, has such wit and humour, that reading is always a pleasure even if you are soon panting for breath. This book is a marvellous example of a mature and confident talent responding with imagination and delight to the local and the familiar: this is a world of friends, streets, paintings, advertisements, songs, memories. A poet like this enables us to see our own world freshly and alerts us to the wonders delivered to us by our senses.

Ian Wedde, poet, fiction writer, critic and art curator, was born in Blenheim in 1946. When he was 7 his family went overseas for 8 years, living first in East Pakistan (Bangladesh) and then in England. They came back to New Zealand when Ian was 15 and he attended King?s College, Auckland, and then the University of Auckland, where he gained a MA in English. From 1966 his poems began appearing regularly in journals, including Landfall and Freed, and he has now has published nine collections of poems including The Commonplace Odes, three novels, short stories, essays and criticism. He has edited several anthologies including The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse (with Harvey McQueen) and The Penguin Book of Contemporary New Zealand Poetry (1989). Ian Wedde won the 1977 Book Award for Fiction for his first novel, Dick Seddon?s Great Dive and the 1978 NZ Book Award for Poetry for Spells for Coming Out (AUP). He was the Burns Fellow in 1972 and other recognition of his writing includes the Writers? Bursary 1974, the Scholarship in Letters 1980, 1989 and the Victoria University writing fellowship 1984. He was a member of the Literary Fund Advisory Committee 1977?79 and of the Queen Elizabeth II Visual Arts Panel in 1990.