Author(s): Janet Frame

Poetry

'The sweet daily bread of language. Smell it rising in its given warmth taste it through the stink of tears and yesterdays and eat it anywhere with any angel in sight.' Janet Frame used to keep geese, using the base of an old garden fountain as their bath. In later years the geese went but the bath was brought indoors as a receptacle into which Janet piled her poems and jottings as she reworked and developed them. Over time the goose bath overflowed with paper, including hundreds of unpublished poems. By the time Janet died she had named her hoped-for but elusive new selection "The Goose Bath". From this treasure trove, Pamela Gordon, Denis Harold and Bill Manhire have selected over a hundred poems that illustrate the shape of her life. First published in hardback in 2006, the collection received critical acclaim and won the poetry category at the 2007 Montana New Zealand Book Awards. This flexibind edition links it with the other titles of the Janet Frame Collection. Janet Frame was born in Dunedin in 1924. She was the author of eleven novels, five collections of stories, a volume of poetry, a children's book and a three-volumed autobiography. She was a Burns Scholar and a Sargeson Fellow and won the New Zealand Scholarship in Letters and the Hubert Church Award for Prose. She was made a CBE in 1983 for services to literature, awarded an honorary doctorate of literature from Otago University in 1978, and one from Waikato University in 1992. She received New Zealand's highest civil honour in 1990 when she was made a Member of the Order of New Zealand. Janet Frame died in January 2004.