Janet Frame is best known for her fiction, but she spoke of poetry as "the highest form of literature because you can have no dead wood in a poem". Although Frame published just one poetry collection, The Pocket Mirror (1967), she never stopped writing poems. Today, a second collection – The Goose Bath – will be launched as part of New Zealand Post Writers and Readers Week. It's two years since 1500 people attended her memorial service in Dunedin, and 12 years since her unadvertised but highly memorable appearance on stage at Writers and Readers Week in a 70th birthday tribute event. Thus it seems timely to revisit Frame’s literary legacy and ask how a new generation of readers might approach the work of New Zealand’s most famous 20^th century writer. Poet Bill Manhire and Frame’s niece and executor Pamela Gordon selected the poems in The Goose Bath. They discuss Frame’s contemporary relevance with Frame scholar Jan Cronin and chair Elizabeth Alley, editor of An Inward Sun: Celebrating the Life and Work of Janet Frame.

 

 

Concession Pass to 15 Writers Upfront sessions of your choice: $150 [FR $140]

 

If this event interests you, you may also like The Sound of Places and Names and Changed Lives.

16 Mar, 3:45pm