The Tram Conductor’s Blue Cap

POETRY FINALIST

The Tram Conductor’s Blue Cap
Michael Harlow
Auckland University Press
ISBN 9781869404307
RRP $24.99

Poetry, Harlow writes, is when words sing. In his remarkable new collection words do sing; they also shout and whisper, riddle and recur, express and evade. The book begins with a springtime shout of green, ends with an invisible reader, and along the way wanders ‘all about the world’. And at the centre is a tram conductor, ‘inside a story that dreams / him’.
 

Michael Harlow was born in the USA in 1937 to a Greek father and American–Ukrainian mother. He travelled extensively in Europe and lived in several other countries before arriving in New Zealand in 1968, where he has lived ever since. In 2009, Michael Harlow was the Burns Fellow at the University of Otago and the inaugural Casselberg House Artist in Residence.