Incident Report
‘Every Elizabeth Morton poem is a grenade to the heart-chambers. You’re left blinking in the afterimage, felled by strange grace. I know of no one else in Aotearoa who can light these soul-fires in our language.’ —TRACEY SLAUGHTER
Incident Report is a stunning new poetry collection from Elizabeth Morton, one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s most inventive and accomplished poets. A visceral and exhilarating read, Incident Report is a finely wrought chronicle of emergency and rescue, and of love and miracles.
Morton wields language with power and precision. Her musically adroit lines carry the reader swiftly, and her fresh-cut images leave a vivid afterglow in the mind. Like the shadows cast by starlings flying over a road in Morton’s ‘A Dark Matter’, this astonishing collection disco-balls the ‘asphalt monotony’ of daily life. These are poems that ‘tally the toll’ of being a ‘budburst of a mammal’, in whose body cortisol and telomeres vie with memory, dreams and choice.
Incident Report is a rollicking existential journey through a dangerous landscape, holding on all the while to the ‘L of love by the scrap of its neck’.
Drive with me
through marshes and mangroves,
through the heat of love and rescue,
past the burnt halls and the wreck
of constellations loose and visionary.
—from ‘ON RAMP; Or, A User Manual for These Poems’
Elizabeth Morton
Elizabeth Morton grew up in suburban Auckland. Her poetry and prose have been published in New Zealand, the UK, the USA, Canada, Ireland, Australia and online. She holds an MLitt in Creative Writing from the University of Glasgow. Morton has accrued many literary acknowledgements for her work, and her previous collection of poetry, This is Your Real Name (OUP, 2020), was longlisted for the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry in the 2021 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. The manuscript of Naming the Beasts was shortlisted for the 2021 Kathleen Grattan Poetry Award.
More About Elizabeth Morton
This is your real name 
Naming the Beasts