New Sea Land

Bill Direen

Direen's fifth book of poetry was generated by a stay south-east of Auckland in 2005. These poems are a response to place, to landscapes, to seascapes, and to the seasonal occurrences he found there. They are a personal, a psychological document, a poetic analysis of contemporary New Zealand, as well as a philosophical analysis of the past as it is contained in our present.

Unlike Direen's some of his earlier volumes of poetry, there are no songs here. This is not a collection nor a selection of his lyrics. It is a log-book of original images, feelings and sounds previously unpublished in any literary journal.

If some of the poems are emphatically musical and require a musical sense to "hear" them, others are instantly-perceptible Whitman-like reflections upon the variety and force of today's New Zealand -- and its Sealanders.