The Midnight Plane: Selected and new poems

(Hardback)

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In The Midnight Plane, Dame Fiona Kidman, one of Aotearoa New Zealands most distinguished writers, returns to her first and deepest literary love, poetry. This beautifully curated volume opens with selected work from Kidmans six previous collections, chronologically ordered, and concludes in the present day with a body of exciting new poems.

The Midnight Plane comes in to land exactly half a century after the 1975 publication of Kidmans debut book, the poetry collection Honey and Bitters. Theres a sense in which The Midnight Plane works like an alternative memoir, offering a poets immediacy of vision and gift of linguistic precision on a life unfolding in real time. From the first line to the last, The Midnight Plane speaks to human relationships, to connection and disconnection, to the mystery and the majesty of life, to seasons of loss and cycles of renewal. Each of these poems is, in its own way, a midnight plane, flying in the dark, navigating for home in sometimes perilous conditions. What I know, writes Kidman in her generous preface to this landmark collection, is that poetry has the power to shake the heart.

Author Bio

Dame Fiona Kidman is a poet, fiction writer and memoirist. She has also written for the screen industry. Her internationally published work has won numerous prestigious literary awards, and her honours include a damehood (DCNZM), an OBE and the French Legion of Honour (La Lgion dHonneur). She lives on a cliff top in Wellington.