hutt

Mark Pirie was born in Wellington, New Zealand, in 1974. He is the Managing Editor for HeadworX, a small press publisher of poetry/fiction. His poems have been published in India, New Zealand, Australia, Croatia, the US and the UK. In 1998 University of Otago Press published his anthology of 'Generation X' writing, The NeXt Wave. He is an editor of JAAM (New Zealand), and serves on the Editorial Advisory Board of Antipodes (USA). Salt Publishing, Cambridge, England, has just published his new and selected poems, Gallery: A Selection.

In his poem, Kevin sketches his old city so well -
  it's almost like running your fingers over a lover
who's now left, but, once, kept you wrapped warm
  under sheets in the cold. In his poem he describes
'the restless sunburnt city', and the bars where
'men in suits are balancing on first-name terms with
other men who have already shrunk the world to views
  they can handle and carry it neatly folded under
their arms' - so good how poems such as this
  can recreate old memories long after an event
has passed, the images compressed into the mind,
like wrinkles lining the skin of your face -
much, it seems, like an epiphany arriving one wintry
morning and arresting the movement of thought.