Speak House, The

In The Speak House David Howard takes "the common phrase 'my life flashed before my eyes' as a signpost", and creates a "feverish tumble of impressions" that might have occurred in the final two hours of Robert Louis Stevenson's life, either just before or just after he lost consciousness. The Speak House was written while the poet was Robert Burns Fellow at the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand, in 2013. Born in Christchurch (1959), David Howard co-founded Takahe magazine (1989) and the Canterbury Poets Collective (1990). He spent his professional life as a pyrotechnics supervisor whose clients included the All Blacks, Janet Jackson and Metallica. In 2003 he retired to Purakanui in order to write. David was the inaugural recipient of the New Zealand Society of Authors Mid-Career Writer's Award (2009) for a body of poetry that has been translated into Dutch, German, Italian, Slovene and Spanish. His collected poems --The incomplete poems - was published by Cold Hub Press in 2011. David Howard was 2013 Robert Burns Fellow at the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand.