Palmy poet a finalist in the Ockham NZ Book Awards

Palmy poet a finalist in the Ockham NZ Book Awards

Palmerston North poet Tim Upperton is one of the finalists in the Ockham NZ Book Awards for his poetry collection The Night We Ate the Baby (Haunui Press, 2014). From today, the visceral red cover of his book bears a small white sticker proclaiming its ‘Finalist’ status to prospective readers, announcing he’s in the running for the prestigious $10,000 cash prize that the 2016 Poetry Award commands.

Tim¬–a writer, poet, father, reviewer, Massey University tutor and PhD student, is no stranger to awards with previous poems of his winning the Bronwyn Tate Memorial International Poetry Competition in 2011 and the Caselberg Trust International Poetry Competition in 2012 and 2013. Tim’s book has been shortlisted from 40 titles on the inaugural longlist announced back in November 2015 across the poetry, general non-fiction, fiction and illustrated non-fiction book categories. The winners of each category will be announced at an event on May 10 2016, at the Auckland Writers Festival.

“Poetry is an almost invisible activity,” says Tim, “and that invisibility gives you almost complete freedom to say in a poem whatever you want. Nobody cares! Nobody cares. I enjoy the freedom of writing in a voice that isn’t really my own – to try on the voice of someone I don’t like very much, for example. I don’t have to be wise, or even smart – just to sound convincingly unpleasant. Not all my poems are like that, of course, but some of the ones I like best are.”

The poems in his shortlisted volume The Night We Ate the Baby have a double life, for they also comprise the creative component of his PhD dissertation on the identity of the ‘I’ who speaks to us in poetry.

Reviewer and fellow poet Ashleigh Young comments on the back cover of his book, “These wilfully, calmly disagreeable poems have tenderness and courage at their heart. Both bleak and hilarious, they perturb so deeply that they comfort... I am both glad and fearful that I will never stop reading this book.” In her poetry blog Eyelashroaming she notes, “This is an important book because it turns upside down notions of how poetry should behave, and especially the notion that a poet’s voice should be likeable and relatable.”

Published by Palmerston North-based boutique publisher HauNui Press in their Kete Series, Tim’s book forms part of a threesome produced by Manawatū writers and funded, designed and produced locally. Alongside Leonel Alvarado’s book Driving with Neruda to the Fish ‘n’ Chips and the late Joy Green’s Surface Tension, the first edition of Tim’s The Night We Ate the Baby came tucked in a traditional tote – 50 beautiful limited edition flax kete woven for the project by Raranga Manawatū, based at the Highbury Weaver’s Centre. Funding support from the Earle Creativity and Development Trust made local production of the book possible, with its design masterminded by Anthony Behrens of Swampthing Media and printing undertaken by Greenlees Print of Masterton.

Haunui Press like to describe their book creation model as ‘slow publishing’. Slow publishing looks to support the local creative economy by using suppliers in your own backyard and respecting the relational aspect of transactions, in the way ‘slow food’ markets support gate-to-plate dealings between home cooks and growers. Says Haunui Press co-director David Lupton, “It’s the ink-slinger to book-lover connections that we’re trying to cultivate each time we help publish a book and we’re stoked to have had this title make it alongside the more traditional publishing models out there.”

ENDS

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