Lifeguard

Here the dual, duelling lifeguards of east and west, sunrise and sunset, glib Narcissus and one-eyed Polyphemus, watch over a collection that explores the contradictions between life's slick surfaces and deepest questions.

Ian Wedde's poet laureate collection opens with new major series The Lifeguard; encompasses a second long sequence, ""Shadow Stands Up"", in which a world of Platonic memory and tidal recurrence is observed from a window-seat in Auckland's Link bus; and finishes with an examination of examination, ""The Look"". In poems that are a complex mix of lyric flight, human detritus observed and verbal dexterity, The Lifeguard is significant for its circling preoccupations; its conceits, images and enquiries traipse from one poem to another, reoccurring at different angles.

Bringing together work from the past four years by one of our most outstanding contemporary poets, The Lifeguard shows Wedde at his thoughtful, surprising best, building 'these lattices and / filigrees of words through which / the light slips, where the shadow / stands up, and we remember'.