Hoof

by Kerrin P. Sharpe

Hoof by Kerrin P. Sharpe arrives with new urgency and longing. These are poems about a father who can only remember one word, ponies that grow hooves of basalt as they pull Scott and Shackelton around Otamahua in sledges, and a woman named Johanna living in a small village in Greenland. She writes about the strange places that watch over our parents, and the delicate but brutal mechanics of surgery. Famous people appear here Leonard Cohen, Ted Hughes, William Blake, and Benedict Cumberbatch at a bus stop. Hoof is an invitation to travel by train through the poet’ s world. The trains that begin each of the three sections in the book give the reader time to stop and stare.

96 pages, Paperback

Published January 11, 2024

About the author

Kerrin P. Sharpe was born in Wellington but now lives in Christchurch where she is a poet and teacher of creative writing. She completed the Victoria University Original Composition programme taught by Bill Manhire in 1976 and has recently returned to writing as her family have grown up and left home.

Kerrin's poems have appeared in many journals, including Hue & Cry, JAAM, The Listener, Poetry NZ, Sport, Takahe, Turbine and the Press, in Best NZ Poems 08, 09 and 10, and in The Best of the Best New Zealand Poems. In 2008 she was awarded the New Zealand Post Creative Writing Teacher's Award from the Institute of Modern Letters. She is currently Writer-in-Residence at St Andrews College and teaches creative writing at the Hagley Writers' Institute.