Book Launch – ‘in the cracks of light’ by Apirana Taylor
Book launch
2-4pm Sunday 16 February, St Peter’s Hall, Paekākāriki
Haere mai! All welcome!
in the cracks of light – Apirana Taylor
Published by Canterbury University Press, December 2024
A new collection of poetry by Apirana Taylor (Ngāti Porou, Te Whānau-ā-Āpanui, and Ngāti Ruanui on his mother’s side; Scottish, Irish and Scandinavian on his father’s) lives in Paekākāriki.
He has always been a poet.
His first book of poems, Eyes of the Ruru, was published in 1979, and launched at Taputeranga Marae in Island Bay. He gently asks the reader to:
Handle with care.
Skim my paper sails.
Read me again.
Unfurl and let
the winds of poetry blow.
Apirana won the 2024 Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Poetry, and released in the cracks of light, his seventh book of poetry, in December. Since 1979 he has published plays, novels and short stories, and is well-known as a storyteller, actor, painter and musician. He reads his poetry in schools, universities and prisons throughout Aotearoa.
Apirana and Prue moved from Brooklyn to Paekākāriki in the late 80s with their four children. He had whānau here and liked the railway town with its artists and community feel and he liked the ocean. They bought the house from an ornithologist, and Apirana’s writing room at the back of the house was full of taxidermied birds. The previous owner had kept a live falcon there.
Apirana has been invited to literary events all around the world. He says India is fascinating and Europe is marvellous. “But it is important to be here. It’s my country. Overseas is like living in someone else’s country.”
He writes to a schedule, especially for longer works, but says that at first it would take him a long time to get his thoughts down. “I used to spend two or three weeks writing a few words, maybe the first line, before I got what I wanted.”
There are 73 short poems in in the cracks of light. Publisher Canterbury University Press describes the poems as “minimalist in construction, but ambitious in emotional impact. They burst out of their small places like gas expanding in a cylinder…”
The first poem in the collection:
note
a poem is
born
in the
cracks
of light
in the
dark
wall
Copies of in the cracks of light will be available at the launch, from bookshops and online, [email protected]. $28.
