COMP CLOSED: Book Giveaway | House & Contents

A remarkable collection of poetry and paintings by acclaimed Wellington poet Gregory O’Brien.

Our mother’s clouds and insects
fly to embrace your clouds
and insects. Her architecture, roads,
bridges and infrastructure
rush to greet yours.
Her molecules on their upward trajectory
entwine with yours, the colour of her eyes,
hair and skin. Her language,

with its past
participles, figures of speech,
the sounds and tremors
which are its flesh and bones
these words go out
to greet your words and
to greet you –
these words
which will never leave her.

House & Contents is a moving meditation on earthquakes and uncertainties, parents and hats, through Gregory O’Brien’s remarkable poetry and paintings.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Gregory O’Brien is an independent writer, painter and art curator. He has written many books of poetry, ction, essays and commentary. His books include A Micronaut
in the Wide World: The Imaginative Life and Times of Graham Percy (Auckland University Press, 2011) and the multi-award-winning introductions to art for the young and curious: Welcome to the South Seas (Auckland University Press, 2004) and Back and Beyond (Auckland University Press, 2008), which both won the Non-Fiction Prize at the New Zealand Post Book Awards for Children and Young Adults. His book Always Song in the Water: An Oceanic Sketchbook was published in 2019, and a major work on the artist Don Binney will appear later in 2022. Gregory O’Brien became an Arts Foundation Laureate and won the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in 2012, and in 2017 became a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit and received an honorary doctorate from Victoria University of Wellington

ENDORSEMENTS

‘Since I taught Greg O’Brien almost forty years ago, his writing has matured and developed in cunning and wisdom; but it is still the work of the writer as I rst encountered him. His combination of visual and verbal art was and is extraordinary. Greg loves beautiful things, and creates them of words and in paint. He has established his identity as poet, craftsman, painter, a sort of impresario of aesthetic order-in-disorder. Admired both at home and abroad, he is unique among New Zealand poets in the way he combines his two arts and makes them one, each enhancing the other.

Bright, fresh and surprising, bordering on the surreal yet peculiar in its literalness, House & Contents is a challenge to the reader – one of rare quality and true originality.’ — C. K. Stead

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Terms and conditions

1. 1. You must be a GrownUps member and receive our newsletter to be eligible to win.
   2. Competition closes on the 22nd March 2022, winners will be notified via email by Thursday 24th March 2022.
   3. As a competition winner, you must confirm you have received our email notifying you of the win within three days. If we have not heard from you in three days the prize will be redrawn, and your prize will be forfeit.
   4. Winners are drawn at random by the GrownUps administration team.
   5. GrownUps employees and family are not eligible to enter.
   6. By entering the giveaway, you approve for GrownUps to use your name on social media as winner of the competition.
   7. One entry per person.
   8. You must reside in New Zealand – the prize will only be posted within New Zealand.
   9. You must be over 50 years of age to enter, check your details are correct in your membership dashboard.