Dunedin poet Iain Lonie (19321988), a Cambridge scholar who enjoyed an international reputation as a medical historian, died before his poetry was fully appreciated. He published five slim volumes but his style was not the one that dominated New Zealand poetry at the time. And yet, argues Damian Love in an essay in this volume, To read him now is, for most of us, practically to discover a new resource. This collection, assembled from sources public and private, is the result of poet David Howards determination to rescue a memorable body of work from oblivion. As well as the poems from Lonies published volumes, it includes over a hundred unpublished works, two essays and an extensive commentary. While his keen interest in mortality was focused by the premature death of his wife Judith (aged 46), Lonies poetry is also an attempt to recover the loved in us all. As he eavesdrops on desire and grief he reports back, often wittily, leaving the most poised body of elegiac poetry New Zealand has. For younger poets, Iain Lonies poetry has become a place to go on from.
David Howard spent 35 years writing The Incomplete Poems (Cold Hub Press, 2011). He is the editor of A Place To Go On From: The collected poems of Iain Lonie (Otago University Press, 2015). He has held the Robert Burns Fellowship (2013), the Otago Wallace Residency (2014), a UNESCO City of Literature Residency in Prague (2016), and the Ursula Bethell Residency at Canterbury University (2016).
"Iain Lonie's poems see clearly but never shrug their shoulders. This book is going to be essential." Bill Manhire, New Zealand's inaugural Poet Laureate
"We cannot overestimate just how much we owe to David Howard for his superb edition of Iain Lonie's complete poems. Just as I, for one, cannot sidestep a certain shame at not realizing until now how fine and important a writer Lonie was. He brought to his poetry the precision and clarity and intellectual force of a gifted classical scholar. He was patiently indifferent to passing fashions, with his own more enduring touchstones. And in a remarkable fidelity to the tides of his productive but troubled life, he wrote a body of poems on love and grief and the searing currents of remembrance that, in New Zealand writing, stands alone." Vincent O'Sullivan, New Zealand Poet Laureate 2013--2015
"I count myself fortunate to have known Iain Lonie as editor and mentor. His fine sensitivity to poetic syntax and nuance is evident in this collected work." Cilla McQueen, three-time winner, New Zealand Book Award for Poetry
