The Lakes of Mars

The Lakes of Mars - Chris Orsman

Auckland University Press, ISBN 978-1-86940-408-6, $24.99 pbk

In The Lakes of Mars, ‘business as usual’ takes Chris Orsman from his Wellington home back to the Antarctic so masterfully described in his collection, South. Orsman is preoccupied in these new poems by perspective; written from the standpoint of an unfamiliar, elemental landscape, from the cloudiness of nostalgia or from the vividness of memory, these are distinctive and scrupulous poems with a marvellous resonance.

Poet and editor Chris Orsman was born in 1955 in Lower Hutt, New Zealand, and was educated in Wellington before gaining his Masters degree in Architecture at The University of Auckland. In his “day job” he works at the US Embassy in Wellington as a marine security guard driver.

He took the IIML Creative Writing course at Victoria University of Wellington in 1993 and was the 2002 Writer in Residence at Victoria's Glen Schaeffer House. In 1997, he won an inaugural Artists in Antarctica grant and travelled to Antarctica in January 1998 with poet Bill Manhire and painter Nigel Brown.

The second part of Orsman’s forthcoming collection The Lakes of Mars (Auckland University Press, May 2008) was inspired by this experience. Orsman’s poems have been published in at least 14 anthologies and a variety of journals.