Good Business

Ian Wedde's new poetry collection, his fourteenth, finds him still in business. At the heart of the book is the stunning 'Good Business' sequence, at once an ode to walking the side-streets of central Wellington and an elegy for the poet's father. Quietly hilarious, the poems are titled after Wellington businesses and institutions - Tony's Tyre Service, Metalworx Engineering, Wellington Scrap Metal, the KFC on the corner of Pirie Street and C O Products Ltd. Gradually, though, Wedde's jaunty and self-deprecating tone becomes more serious and elegiac. Other sequences include 'Seven Dreams' and the lyrical but mordant 'Arriving Blind', in which Wedde travels from Bangladesh to the south of France, playing with the contrasts of light and dark, dawn and dusk, arriving and departing, sight and blindness.