Good Business

Know about the book -

Good Business is written by Ian Wedde and published by Auckland University Press. It's available with International Standard Book Number or ISBN identification 1869407180 (ISBN 10) and 9781869407186 (ISBN 13).

Ian Wedde's new poetry collection Good Business, his fourteenth, finds him still in business. At the heart of the book is a stunning sequence, 'Good Business', at once an ode to walking the side-streets of central Wellington and an elegy for the poet's father. Quietly hilarious, the poems are titled after Wellington businesses and institutions - Toyota, Tony's Tyre Service, Metalworx Engineering, Wellington Scrap Metal, the KFC on the corner of Pirie St, and the SPCA. Gradually, though, Wedde's jaunty and self-deprecating tone becomes more serious and elegiac. The collection has two other major sequences. 'Seven dreams' is full of surreal and quirky moments and humour stretched thin over night terrors; and in the lyrical but mordant 'Arriving blind', Wedde travels from Bangladesh to the south of France, playing with the contrasts of light and dark, dawn and dusk, arriving and departing, sight and blindness. In Good Business Wedde 'continues that vivid exchange he has long worked at between the disconnected particulars of experience and ordering forms of poetry'.