Michele Leggott

Search for a word or phrase in this book …

Biographical note:  Michele Leggott has published five books of poetry, including Milk & Honey (2005) and As far as I can see (1999). She is co-editor of Big Smoke: New Zealand Poems 1960–1975 (2000) with Alan Brunton and Murray Edmond, and editor of Robin Hyde’s long poem The Book of Nadath (1999) and Young Knowledge: The Poems of Robin Hyde (2003). Leggott is also the author of Reading Zukofsky’s 80 Flowers (1989) and completed a doctorate at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, in 1985. A major project since 2001 has been the development of the New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre (nzepc) at the University of Auckland where she is an Associate Professor of English.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844712656
ISBN-10:  1844712656
ISBN-13:  9781844712656
Author:  Michele Leggott
Title:  Milk & Honey
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  01-Sep-06
Extent:  128pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  8 mm
Weight:  192 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 9.99
Price:  USD 15.95
Rights:  Rest of world
Not for sale:  AU
Not for sale:  NZ

Main description:  There is a poem in As far as I can see (AUP, 1999) that imagines a future time: They gave me flowers and asked where I would go. To open the eyes of the soul, I said. There is a way but this is only the first gate.

milk and honey is a dance to the music of that future time. It looks back and remembers. It looks forward and tries to see what will happen next. Its theatre is the world turning round and what can be saved each day from a life of the imagination. It builds tentative structures from smaller parts that come and go like thought itself. It is a lamentation, the universe as circus. It is a pattern of doors opening. It counts and it listens.

It is a series of border-crossings between light and dark, old world and new, history and desire, body and soul, life and death, yes and no. It is an attempt on happiness, another search for the oh of transformation.

It is in three parts with a gateway at either end. It can be read from the front or the back and there is seriousness but also songs along the way. Why is it called milk and honey? Because of a song. Why are there two clowns on the cover? Because one morning they were front-page news

Table of contents:
wilderness
1 TO OPEN THE EYES
so far
faith and rage
tonight I am sad
milk of almonds / white magnolia
cairo vessel 1
cairo vessel 2
2 MILK AND HONEY
milk and honey taken far far away
words beyond light
certain pockets of resistance
angels and oracles
festival junction
3 FADO
poetics of exile
cirque velo
Eurydice's red car
her songs
a lost eclogue
manna beans
ports of the archipelago
salto, salto, where are your shoes?
I dreamed your book was written and the great So praised it
future song
wild light

View excerpt as PDF:

Click here to view a sample (508 KB)

Excerpt from book:  

Review quote:  Impresario of the NZ Electronic Poetry Center and author of Reading Zukofsky’s 80 Flowers, professor at the University of Auckland, Michele Leggott continues to write complex lyrics, sampling thought and song, voice and vision.

Charles Bernstein
Notable Books (Summer 2005):

Review quote:  Milk & Honey shows us that the ordinary is full of marvels … which, stitched, flow together into sequences and episodes that in turn form an ongoing serial, or bricolage: a single poem, then, rejecting exactness, literalism, naturalism in favour of resonance, currents, patterns of ebb and flow … Leggott is arguably our finest living female rhapsodist.

David Eggleton
NZ Listener