Lyrical Ballads

Temporarily out of stock

Bill Manhire has always subscribed
to Paul Valery’s definition of poetry as ‘a prolonged hesitation between sound
and sense’. In that spirit, many of the poems in this new, dazzling collection
blend story and song, and do so using everyday words and phrases that –
suddenly, on the page – become new and delightfully weird.

This is a many-peopled collection:
the baffled inhabitants of Every Street and Intermediate Street are here, while
Dracula, T.S. Eliot and Bobby Outram from Outram have walk-on parts. The
collection is anchored by two long sequences that embrace awkwardness, mystery
and absurdity: ‘The Tobacco Tin’, a
kind of folk story riding along on its own lacunae, and ‘Tell You What’, a set of curmudgeonly
opinions that evoke the prejudices of a fast-vanishing world.

As they notice the small
collisions between wonder and everyday reality, and the trajectories of those
who don’t fit easily in this world, these poems close in on the darker
certainties of our lives.

Format: Paperback
Pages: 136
Imprint: Te Herenga Waka University Press
Publication date: 12/02/2026