At the Point of Seeing
- The Laurel Prize 2024 Best International First Collection Winner
- Winner of the Jessie Mackay Prize for Poetry at the 2024 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards
- Shortlisted for the 2024 Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry at the 2024 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards
‘The feeling that evolves from the poems – the emotion a reader might respond with – is part of that unique attention that for me is so immediate, and then so resonant.’ – Vincent O’Sullivan
At the Point of Seeing is the extraordinary debut collection from Ōtepoti Dunedin poet Megan Kitching. Poised, richly observant and deftly turned, Kitching’s poems bestow a unique attention upon the world. Her eye is finely attuned to the well-trodden yet overlooked – the places between ‘dirt and thumb’ or ‘together and alone’ – and especially the weedy, overgrown and pest-infested places where the human impulses to name, control and colonise meet nature’s life force and wild exuberance. These compelling poems urge the reader to slow down and give space to the living, moving, breathing environment that surrounds them.
… the garden
is making something of you, situated on
the border of dirt and thumb, the corner
with its stepover wall where two streets
grow neighbourly and flora and animal meet.
— from ‘Growing Advice’
Megan Kitching
Megan Kitching was born in Tāmaki Makarau Auckland and now lives in Ōtepoti Dunedin. She holds a PhD in English Literature from Queen Mary University, London, looking at the influence of the natural sciences on eighteenth-century poetry. She has taught English and creative writing in the UK and at the University of Otago. Her poetry has appeared in The Frogmore Papers (UK), takahē, Poetry New Zealand, and Landfall. “The horses,” published in takahē 95, was nominated for Best Small Fictions 2020. In 2021, she was the inaugural Caselberg Trust Elizabeth Brooke-Carr Emerging Writer Resident. At the Point of Seeing is...
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