Deep Colour - Paperback

by Diana Bridge (Author)

Deep Colour, by acclaimed poet Diana Bridge, is a fiercely sensory and meticulously crafted collection. These poems respond with graceful precision to the immediate physical world, and meditate on time, beauty and the nature of being. Whether remembering a friend, describing a child's first steps, or observing her surroundings - a tree, a painting, the flashing fin of a goldfish, a simple everyday object like a lamp or a bowl - Bridge is finely attuned to the here-and-now. 'While it lived, ' she writes, 'it was intensity itself.' These prismatic poems, which include some exquisite translations of poems by the fifth-century Chinese poet Xie Tiao, are fully immersed in the world, vividly alive to the dance of light and shadow, movement and stillness, sound and silence. Few poets see so clearly or write so luminously. Bridge's poems return us to the daily round with our senses heightened, our minds alert and our hearts made tender. Deep colour, the words for it are out of range - That much I can tell you. What I cannot say is how a life gathers its themes - From Deep Colour

Author Biography

Deep Colouris the eighth collection by award-winning Wellington-based poet Diana Bridge. It follows Two or More Islands (Otago University Press, 2019). Bridge's many accolades include the 2010 Lauris Edmond Memorial Award for Poetry, the 2014 Landfall Essay Competition prize and the 2015 Sarah Broom Poetry Prize. The chief judge, Irish poet Vona Groarke, described her work as 'possibly amongst the best being written anywhere right now'. The same year, Bridge was the first New Zealander since Janet Frame to take up a residency at the Writers' and Artists' Colony at Yaddo in upstate New York.