Helen Rickerby
Helen Rickerby is a poet and publisher from Wellington. She has published four collections of poetry—her most recent, Cinema, was published by Mākaro Press in 2014. She runs Seraph Press, a boutique publishing company with a growing reputation for publishing high-quality poetry books, and she is co-managing editor of JAAM literary journal. She is currently indulging her interest in biographical poetry (about which she recently co-organised a conference at Victoria University of Wellington) by writing prose poetry about George Eliot.
Rickerby comments: ‘“Coming of age in New Zealand film” was published in Cinema, which, as you might expect, contains poems that were inspired by films and film-making; though I actually wrote this poem quite some time before I had the thematic idea for the collection. I’d been thinking about a bunch of New Zealand films I’d seen recently that all told the same archetypal story, a New-Zealand-gothic coming of age, though in different ways and places and times. I guess I’m interested in exploring (though am often frustrated by) the ways we represent ourselves, and create ourselves.’
