Otherwise

Shortlisted for the 2017 Michael Murphy Memorial Poetry Prize. Shortlisted for the 2016 Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Prize for First Full Collection.  The poems in this first collection by New Zealand poet John Dennison are concerned, above all, with love, and with the strange, unlooked-for manner of its appearances among us. Marked by emotional acuity and formal deftness, Otherwise draws us into confrontations with our equivocal and finite nature. The book includes, among other elegies, a moving sequence for Seamus Heaney. Here too, because ‘some things bear repeating’, are moments of turning, of grace and our refusals. This is a moving and thought-provoking collection from an assured new voice. 

John Dennison is a New Zealand Anglican chaplain, poet, and poetry scholar who has written about the work of James K. Baxter. He contributed to the bestselling 2011 New Poetries V anthology.