Latitudes; Owen Leeming

Owen Leeming's 1972 collection Venus is Setting, with its centrepiece 'The Priests of Serrabonne', was marked for praise by Kendrick Smithyman, Vincent O'Sullivan and James K. Baxter, but it would take the best part of five decades until his next collection was published. Latitudes: New & Selected Poems contains selections from Venus is Setting and 2019's Through Your Eyes, which comprised poems from the 1960s and 70s along wiith others written in more recent years. It also includes a section of hitherto uncollected earlier poems and another of new work offered for the first time. Leeming's early poems remain fresh and energetic, marked by their rare reconciliation of the playful and the serious. The recent poems sparkle intensified brio and rambunctiousness, by which readers are offered the world freshly rendered in words with an utterly uncommon intelligence and sensuousness. Charting a course from youthful disillusionment to celebratory old-age, Owen Leeming's Latitudes: New & Selected Poems will surprise, delight and challenge readers of poetry with its open-eyed love of life and language. Owen Leeming was born in Christchurch, New Zealand in 1930. He has spent much of his adult life in the UK and France working for the BBC, UNESCO and as a translator with the OECD. He was the first Katherine Mansfield Fellow in Menton in 1970.