Vivid Familiar
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Vivid Familiar is a book of journeys. At its centre is the astonishing Feathers and Wax, in which the housebound poet is taken away by an airship that pulls up at her kitchen window. Other poems explore the long journey of the early European settlers of New Zealand, notions of distance and belonging, dislocation and constraint. But equally important are the arrivals, and the vivid familiars that sustain the spirit.
Steffanie de Montalk is the award-winning author of three previous collections of poems; The Fountain of Tears, a novel, maybe the most exotic story yet written in this country, that imagines the narrative behind Pushkin's great poem of impossible love, The Fountain at Bakhchisaray; and Unquiet World: The Life of Count Geoffrey Potocki de Montalk, which was published to acclaim in 2001 and has been translated into Polish. Steffanie de Montalk was the 2005 Victoria University Writer in Residence, and lives in Wellington.