Anything can happen, and regularly does, in the wide-angled lens of these spinning lines. The world passes through in its carnival masks. Despair and joy gyrate through ribbons of asphalt, memories of glass, landscapes and divisions of mind. These poems, reactive yet contemplative, euphoric yet direct, give off brightly coloured sparks as they probe the fate of love in an age of unreason.
Mike Johnson, fiction writer and poet, is recognised as one of New Zealand's leading, innovative writers. He lives on Waiheke Island and has taught creative writing at AUT University and the University of Auckland. In 2002 he received The University of Auckland's Literary Fellowship, having been Literary Fellow at Canterbury University in 1987. His first novel, Lear, the Shakespeare Company Plays Lear at Babylon was short listed for the New Zealand Book Awards in 1986, his novel Dumb Show won the Buckland Memorial Award for Literary Excellence in 1995, and he won the Frances Kean Award his short story, 'Magic Strings' in 1999. His first book of poetry, The Palanquin Ropes, (1983) was co-winner of the John Cowie Reed Memorial Competition. His non-fiction, Angel of Compassion, was shortlisted for the Ashton Whyle Award in 2014, and a poem from Vertical Harp, The selected poems of Li He (2006) has been anthologised in the Essential New Zealand Poems: Facing the Empty Page (Random House, 2015). Mike Johnson is the author of twenty-six books including nine books of poetry, three of shorter fiction, one non fiction, three children's books, and ten novels.
