AUTHOR TALK: Airini Beautrais & Helen Lehndorf

Please join us to hear Airini and Helen talk about humour in poetry, and listen as they read from these recently published books.

Airini's recent poetry collection, Salt Quilt, is a portrait of an uneasy stretch of time. The poet looks back at various episodes of her life and then far ahead, to other lives and ways of seeing. She sheds cynicism, celebrates some constraints and rejects others, and keeps rewriting the endings. Poetry has saved her more than once. On the inside maybe she is becoming a 1980s self-help guy.

Helen Lehndorf captures the beauties and burdens of entanglement with people and with place. The poems of The Bruise Palette move through the demands of care, complexities of community and raw radiance of deep nature connection. Lehndorf explores how we are shaped and sometimes bruised by the people we love and the land we live on.