Author(s): Pat White

NZ Poetry

NIGHT SHIFTS is a new collection of poems from Pat White, (1944–), poet, essayist, memoirist and artist whose work often directly reflects his interest in rural life and the natural environment and draws on his experience living in different places around New Zealand, from the bottom of the South Island to the far north. His poems have been described by Jack Ross as ‘beautiful, unassuming and perfectly paced, all at the same time’(Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2020). Reviewing his previous collection Watching for the Wingbeat,  

Janet Hughes wrote of a poet ‘attuned to the natural world and rural environments as settings for deep and wide reflection, filtered through scholarship‘ (New Zealand Review of Books, Autumn 2019). Pat’s first collection of poetry, Signposts, was published in 1977; the most recent was his new and selected poems Watching for the Wingbeat, (Cold Hub Press 2018.) His biography of poet Peter Hooper, Notes from the Margins: the West Coast’s Peter Hooper appeared in 2017.