Brass Band to Follow

Bryan Walpert’s fourth collection of lyric poems ranges in its focus from flowers to infinities, from laundry to eternity, but is founded most fully on what it is to move into middle age – to wait for life’s promised brass band to arrive.

Whether writing from the perspective of a parent watching childhood slip away or ventriloquising the 17th-century scientific language of Robert Hooke and Robert Boyle to craft surprising love poems, he engages the world with a keen and often witty perception, a deft juggling of the sentence, and a sense of wonder.

Frequently playful in approach, the poems are always serious in their engagement with the bewildering nature of time passing – of growing up and growing older.

BRYAN WALPERT is the author of three previous collections of poetry – Etymology, A History of Glass and most recently Native Bird. He is also the author of a novella, Late Sonata, winner of the Seizure Viva La Novella prize; a collection of short fiction, Ephraim’s Eyes; and two scholarly books: Poetry and Mindfulness: Interruption to a Journey, and Resistance to Science in Contemporary American Poetry. His work has appeared in New Zealand, Australia, the UK, the US and Canada, and has been recognised by the Montreal International Poetry Award, the New Zealand International Poetry Competition and the James Wright Poetry Award (US). He is a professor in creative writing at Massey University, Auckland. More on Bryan can be found at bryanwalpert.com.

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