Fire-Penny
Snapshot reconstructions of life on Scotland’s remote St Kilda island – the ancestral home of the McQueens – open this tenth collection of poetry from Cilla McQueen. The spare life of this place, shaped by birds, sea and weather, leads into a new set of poems from the poet’s Bluff home: quiet observations on friends and animals, memories and dreams, and weather. Many of the reflective poems are conversational in style; one is written in the form of a play, and another appears at first to be a dictionary definition. Even the simplest of topics, such as eating cake or meeting a newborn baby, are taken up by McQueen and transformed into thoughtful works.
The collection closes with a section entitled ‘A Widow’s Songs’, in which the poet mourns her late partner.
McQueen’s 2006 CD A Wind Harp was designed as a companion to Fire-Penny.
Cilla McQueen
Cilla McQueen MNZM is a poet, teacher and artist, and a three-time winner of the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry. She received an honorary doctorate in literature from the University of Otago in 2008 and was New Zealand Poet Laureate from 2009 to 2011. In 2010 she received the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement (Poetry). In 2020 she was appointed a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services as a poet. Cilla lives in Bluff, at the southern tip of New Zealand’s South Island.
More About Cilla McQueen
A Wind Harp 
Axis 
Soundings 
Markings 
Poeta 
The Radio Room 
In a Slant Light 
Edwin’s Egg and Other Poetic Novellas