Craven

Author(s): Jane Arthur

NZ Poetry

Craven is an exceptional debut: Jane Arthur delights, unnerves and challenges in poems that circle both the everyday and the ineffable - piano practice, past lives, being forced onto dancefloors.


This is a smart and disarming collection that traces the ever-changing forms of light and dark in our lives, and how our eyes adjust, despite ourselves, as we go along.


Product Information

  • Longlisted for the Ockham NZ Book Awards (Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry 2020)  
  • Winner of the 2020 Jessie Mackay Prize for Poetry (MitoQ Best First Book Award) at the Ockham NZ Book Awards

'The poems in Craven seduced and delighted us even as they revealed a speaker filled with uncertainty, self-loathing, futility. They did that thing that the best lyric poetry does: they showed us an emotional interior, an individual human heart (often a literal heart, a stubborn, durable, hidden muscle) by way of a patient, alert attention to the world beyond the self. This introverted speaker demands to be seen, to be heard — and she is seen and heard in these remarkable poems. Jane Arthur takes, in a phrase lifted from one of them, a “sharp, large knife” to the speaker’s observed reality: she cuts it and refashions it into something new and strange, and transports us there.' —Judges' comments, Ockham NZ Book Awards 2020

General Fields

  • : 9781776562879
  • : Victoria University of Wellington Press
  • : Victoria University of Wellington Press
  • : 0.127006
  • : September 2019
  • : ---length:- '8.25'width:- '6.5'units:- Inches
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Jane Arthur
  • : Paperback
  • : English
  • : 821.3
  • : near fine
  • : 80