The Word Went Round

Powerful historical poems about nineteenth-century Irish emigration to New Zealand, the colonial wars, Von Tempsky and Te Kooti, moving elegies for poet/painter Joanna Margaret Paul, the artist Reiko Kunimatsu and the poet’s late father, love poems, and meditations on the nature of spiritual existence in the intellectual pressure-cooker of the twenty-first century.

Howard’s poems are accompanied by a selection of haunting images by the painter Garry Currin, produced to accompany the long title-poem which is the central feature of the book.

this glasshouse is a map of the world
curling aound the poles: America
a perennial at the centre
New Zealand floats in a styrofoam tray