At The White Coast

Description

Making landfall among the inhabitants of a gritty metropolis, these poems transport the reader from the white coast of New Zealand, the Land of the Long White Cloud, to the shores of another country and another time. Set on the cusp of the 1970s and 1980s, Janet Charman's compelling poetry collection centers on the disorienting experiences of a young woman from the former British colony of New Zealand who has newly arrived in London--squalid flats, temp work, ancestral visits, and trips to the continent. With an eye for unsettling social cues, her outsider's vision of the city is persistently challenged by encounters with an array of its remarkable inhabitants: distant relatives, welfare clients and their social workers, and fellow travelers. In gritty lyric and biting word play, this account of the overseas experience reveals a passage hedged with earnest expectation and ripe with the black comedy of disillusion.

Author description

Janet Charman has an MA in English from the University of Auckland for which she completed a thesis on the novels of Jane Austen. She was the Literary Fellow (Writer in Residence) there in 1997. Her first collection of poems was published by New Women’s Press in 1987 and she has since published five books with AUP: red letter (1992), end of the dry (1995), Rapunzel Rapunzel (1999), snowing down south (2002) and cold snack (2007), winner of the 2008 Montana New Zealand Book Award for Poetry. In 2009 she was the recipient of a month-long visiting fellowship at the International Writers Workshop of Hong Kong Baptist University. In the following year ‘at the white coast’ was co-winner of the International Writers' Workshop (Auckland) Kathleen Grattan Prize for an unpublished sequence of poems. Charman has supported her writing with work as a nurse, telephone operator and teacher and lives in Avondale, Auckland, with her partner and their two daughters