Tigers at Awhitu

Overview

Against a backdrop of many times and landscapes, the poems in Tigers at Awhitu , the first, luminous book by Sarah Broom, chart the drifts and tides of intimate relationships, the physical extremes of illness, the complexities of motherhood. Here a refugee family walks north on a frozen road; a solitary figure sleeps in the desert outside a fabular city; a mother watches a child’s first gesture. With tough, deft attention to language and its emotional power, Sarah Broom asks us to consider our relationships with the world and with words. Hers is an unflinching and original new voice in New Zealand poetry.

Author Biography

Sarah Broom was born and educated in New Zealand before moving to the England for post-graduate study at Leeds and Oxford. She lectured at Somerville College, Oxford, before returning home in 2000. She has held a post-doctoral fellowship at Massey (Albany) and lectured in English at Otago University. Broom also is the author of Contemporary British and Irish Poetry (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). Her own poetry has been published widely in journals, including Landfall, Bravado, Takahe, Poetry New Zealand and, in the UK, Orbis, Metre, Acumen and Oxford Magazine.