Some of the poems in this volume have previously appeared in Cordite, the Dominion Post, Dublin Poetry Review, HEAT, Hue & Cry, Katherine Mansfield Studies, New Books in German, New Zealand Listener, lyrikline.org, Pipi: The Cookbook, Shenandoah, Snorkel, Sport, Sweet Mammalian and the Warwick Review, and ‘Wrecker’s Song’ also appears on the CD Trapezing (2010) by Robbie Duncan. A number of the poems were written during my time as 2011 Katherine Mansfield Fellow, and ‘Antipodean’, ‘The audition’ and ‘Venera’ (a response to the Dark Sky exhibition at the Adam Art Gallery) were written for the Transit of Venus Poetry Exchange 2012; I am hugely grateful to New Zealand Post, the Winn-Manson Menton Trust, and the Goethe Institut Wellington for their support in those projects.
‘The Kingdom’ (p. 13) recycles two lines of dialogue from Jean Cocteau’s 1946 film Beauty and the Beast. ‘Spell for a child to remember’ (p. 97) recycles a line from Guy Clark’s song ‘Too Much’.
The cover image and illustrations are by artist and printer Leo Bensemann (1912–1986), from the book Fantastica: Thirteen Drawings, Caxton Press, Christchurch, 1937 (new edition, with an introduction by Peter Simpson, published by the Holloway Press, Auckland, 1997). Reproductions of the drawings can also be found in Peter Simpson’s book on the artist, Fantastica: The World of Leo Bensemann, Auckland University Press, 2011. The original ink drawings are now at the Alexander Turnbull Library, c. 1936–37, various sizes.
Cover and frontispiece: Mask
Page 1: A Japanese Tale
Page 25: The Water of Life
Page 53: Till Eulenspiegel
Page 95: The Little Witch
Reproduced with the kind permission of the Bensemann estate.