Root Leaf Flower Fruit

A woman lies helpless after a stroke, her family gathered. Her grandson, healing slowly from a head injury after coming off his bike, takes leave from his job and family to prepare her rundown house and farm for sale. As he works, he sifts through what remains of his grandmother’s daily life. Then, after an auction result for which he was not prepared, and echoing her desperate flight years earlier, his uncertain return leads to a haunting and unguessable destination.Root Leaf Flower Fruit is a verse novel about slow time – the turning of the seasons, the farming of land, the generations of a family – and about sudden, devastating interruptions.‘This book kept surprising me. I loved its fascination with the body’s sleights of hand, and the careful attention it paid to childhood, memory and other buried things.’ —Anna Smaill, author of The Chimes and Bird Life

“It’s quite a feat to create a novel-length poem like this. Bill Nelson has done it with panache.” - NZ Listener

“This book kept surprising me. I loved its fascination with the body’s sleights of hand, and the careful attention it paid to childhood, memory and other buried things.” - Anna Smaill, author of The Chimes and Bird Life

“Root Leaf Flower Fruit seems to me to be a sort of Pakeha whakapapa, or a yearning for it, and a commentary on the ways in which Pakeha reach for connection to place and people but sometimes miss. The most beautiful passages describe the body failing while the whenua continues its seasonal rotation. I was completely absorbed by this story song of a grandson and grandmother trying to connect both to the world around them and to their sense of self.” - Tina Makereti, author of The Imaginary Lives of James Poneke and Where the Rekohu Bone Sings

“Funny and destabilising, Root Leaf Flower Fruit is a haunting insight into the “pattern of a damaged brain slowly healing”.” - Lawrence Patchett, The Spinoff

“The plot momentum and machination transported me swiftly through the pages.” - Vaughan Rapatahana, Kete Books

“I take my hat off to anyone who writes a verse novel because its such an affirmative thing to do in terms of valuing art.” - Airini Beautrais, RNZ

Bill Nelson's first book of poetry was Memorandum of Understanding (2016). His poems have appeared in Best New Zealand Poems, Sport, Landfall, Hue & Cry, Shenandoah, The Spinoff, Minarets and The 4th Floor, as well as in dance performances and art galleries and on posters. In 2009 he won the Biggs Family Prize in Poetry from the International Institute of Modern Letters, and he is a founding editor of Up Country: A Journal for the NZ Outdoors. He lives in Te Whanganui-a-Tara with his partner and two children, and his dog, Callimachus Bruce.

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