Ian Wedde
Ian Wedde is the author of fifteen collections of poetry, six novels, two collections of essays, a collection of short stories, a monograph on the artist Bill Culbert and several art catalogues, and has been co-editor of two poetry anthologies. His work has been widely anthologised, and has appeared in journals nationally and internationally. Wedde's first novel, Dick Seddon’s Great Dive, won the New Zealand Book Award for Fiction (1977), and a poetry collection, Spells for Coming Out, was co-winner of the National Book Award for Poetry in 1978. His most recent collection, The Lifeguard, was a finalist in the 2013 New Zealand Post Book Awards.
Wedde was the Robert Burns Fellow at the University of Otago in 1972, the Victoria University Writing Fellow in 1984, and the Katherine Mansfield Fellow in Menton in 2005. He received an Arts Foundation Laureate award in 2006, a Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of Auckland in 2007, was the University of Auckland Michael King Writer in Residence in 2009 and won the Landfall Essay Prize in 2010. In 2010 he was also awarded an ONZM in the Queen’s Birthday Honours, and was New Zealand Poet Laureate 2011–2013. In 2013 he was awarded the Creative New Zealand Berlin Writers' Residency.
Wedde comments: ‘The complete “Lifeguard” sequence has nine sections of between eighty and ninety lines each, organised in couplets. There’s a clue to the underlying purpose of the whole poem in this large structure. In a general way it involves an ongoing dialogue between the two coasts of the north island of New Zealand, the rugged west and the resort east. Each coast is spoken for by a lifeguard: the rough west by a character out of Theocritus, the cyclops Polyphemus (“rich in songs”), hopelessly infatuated with the water-nymph Galatea; and the east by a character out of Ovid, Narcissus, hopelessly infatuated with his own reflection in water. Neither is able to pay attention to the upraised arms of swimmers in trouble. The trouble that was worrying me while I was writing the poem was the trouble we’re in—both environmental, and the consequence of our inattention. The couplets are in themselves miniature dialogues, line-to-line, and couplet-to-couplet. The anxiety that drove this dialogue between rough west and languorous east is partly the result of having grandchildren: what looks bad enough in the short view looks a lot worse in the long one. That said, the poem is also a celebration of a place I love, which I’d come back to after many years. This first section in a sense introduces the lifeguards and sets up the dialogue.’
