The Incomplete Poems by David Howard

The Incomplete Poems is both a summation and a wiping clean of the slate. Here, in their definitive versions, are those poems that I am prepared to stand beside as chalk and duster come to rest next to one another.

– David Howard

David Howard is a poet of immense gifts. Not least the fact that he knows how to make poems of discovery that go beyond mere ‘invention’. Poems that are passionately thoughtful and intelligent; and with a finely tuned lyric voice that puts feeling first. A poetry that reaches ‘Beyond what is/said to what is, impossible’. Again and again, how to make the invisible, visible; and to make it sing. And he does this in poems that are very much animated by a thoughtful music: those moments of quick surprise that so often are stunning in their overall effect. And time and time again, such a pleasure to read, and to hear and know that he has something to say that matters. And what Howard knows as a poet is that ‘poetry can make intimate everything that it touches’. Surely, David Howard is one of the most original voices in New Zealand poetry.

– Michael Harlow

Born in Christchurch (1959), David co-founded Takahe magazine (1989) and the Canterbury Poets Collective (1990). He spent his professional life as a pyrotechnics supervisor whose clients included the All Blacks, Janet Jackson and Metallica. In 2003 he retired to Purakanui in order to write. David was the inaugural recipient of the New Zealand Society of Authors Mid-Career Writer's Award (2009) for a body of poetry that has been translated into Dutch, German, Italian, Slovene and Spanish. In September 2011 he was joint winner of the poetry section of the international literary competition to mark the launching of the USP Press by the University of the South Pacific.

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