Tigers at Awhitu

Book excerpt: Against a backdrop of many times and landscapes, the poems in Tigers at Awhitu , the first, luminous book by Sarah Broom, chart the drifts and tides of intimate relationships, the physical extremes of illness, the complexities of motherhood. Here a refugee family walks north on a frozen road; a solitary figure sleeps in the desert outside a fabular city; a mother watches a child's first gesture. With tough, deft attention to language and its emotional power, Sarah Broom asks us to consider our relationships with the world and with words. Hers is an unflinching and original new voice in New Zealand poetry.