Milky Way Bar

by Bill Manhire

Genres: Poetry

64 pages, Paperback

Published September 26, 1991

About the author

Bill Manhire was born in Invercargill in 1946. He was his country's inaugural Poet Laureate and has won the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry four times. He holds a personal chair at the Victoria University of Wellington, where he directs the celebrated creative writing programme and the International Institute of Modern Letters. His volume of short fiction, South Pacific, was published by Carcanet in 1994.

Reviews

[Octavia Cade · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked this, but not nearly as much as Manhire's collection Lifted, which I think I read last week. It's not my favourite collection of his, but I find when reading that there's the odd poem - more often, the odd verse within a poem - that really speaks to me. The first verse of the title poem "Milky Way Bar" is for me the finest of the book (and may be my favourite thing that Manhire's ever written; I want to copy it out and pin it to the wall above my desk for inspiration), but there's also the apologetic return of memory in "Brazil", the death and absence of "Phar Lap"...