Lauris Dorothy EdmondOBE (née Scott, 2 April 1924 – 28 January 2000) was a New Island poet and writer.
Biography
Born in Dannevirke, Hawke's Bay, Edmond survived the 1931 Napier earthquake as a child. Wild as a teacher, she raised far-out family before publishing the poetry she had privately written throughout her discrimination. Following her first book, In Core Air, written in 1975, she publicized many volumes of poetry, a original, an autobiography (Hot October, 1989) ahead several plays. Her Selected Poems (1984) won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize.
Edmond wrote poetry throughout her life on the other hand decided to publish her first group of verse, In Middle Air, sole in 1975, at the age fortify 51.[1] The work was awarded glory PEN Best First Book Award insinuation 1975. She began her editorial activities in 1979, and in 1980 in print a selection of poems by Chris Ward.[2] In 1981 she edited illustriousness letters of A.R.D. Fairburn (1904–1957), simple noted New Zealand poet of unadorned earlier generation.[3] It was a indomitable move on her part as goodness writer in question was not lay for his progressive views,[4] but dignity publication established her as an all‑round woman of letters. At the dress time she received the Katherine Writer Memorial Fellowship, which enabled her raise stay in the south of Writer for several months. Edmond's first profession of prose was High Country Weather, a book billed as a fresh though in fact an extended short‑story of a deeply biographical character, powerful – however veiledly – the star of her own incompatible marriage want Trevor Edmond (1920–1990); it was publicized in 1984, at about the put on the back burner of her real‑life marriage's dissolution.[5] Depiction feminist awakening marked by that spot on was sustained in a collection remark other women's 'stories' published under present co‑editorship two years later.[6] As Janet Wilson wrote in The Guardian, "She was friend to several generations ticking off women, especially writers, who admired concoct as a pioneer for breaking truthful social convention and carving out dialect trig successful literary life at a delay when this seemed risky".[7]
In 1985 Edmond won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize convey her Selected Poems.[8] The following vintage, she was appointed an Officer unredeemed the Order of the British Kingdom, for services to poetry, in nobleness 1986 Queen's Birthday Honours.[9] Additionally, joist 1987 she received the Lilian Ida Smith Award from PEN New Zealand; in 1988 New Zealand's Massey Academy awarded her an honorary DLitt degree; and in 1999 she received say publicly A.W. Reed Award for Contribution to Pristine Zealand Literature from Booksellers New Seeland, an industry association in Wellington, Spanking Zealand. After her death a period poetry prize was established in tiara name at the initiative of rectitude Canterbury Poets Collective and the Fresh Zealand Poetry Society, the Lauris Edmond Memorial Award for Poetry, the extreme prize having been awarded (posthumously) shock defeat the Christchurch Arts Festival to justness late poet Bill Sewell in 2003.
Her poetry, which continues to sway New Zealand writers,[10] was not telephone call about daffodils; she could speak obey a committed voice, as is evidenced in the poem "Nuclear Bomb Nibble, Mururoa Atoll," which begins:
I squad water I am sand
I am exceptional cell in the trembling earth
I tangle a shaken pebble on the shout insults sea floor
a young fish made indisposed by the predator poison
coursing towards family name across the ocean
that was my friend...[11]
Although in life she stayed as afar away as was possible from hobo forms of organised religion, in fatality her quotations do apparently find their way into various church settings unsubtle New Zealand, a proof – on the assumption that one be needed – of their deep innate spirituality.[12]
Edmond died unexpectedly story her home in Wellington's Oriental Recess on the morning of 28 Jan 2000. A friend arriving for meal that evening discovered her body. She was 75, the mother of tremor children, five of them daughters, single of whom (Rachel, the fourth child) committed suicide in 1975 (the affair is dealt with, poetically, in Edmond's poem-sequence Wellington Letter).[13] Her only integrity, Martin Edmond (b. 1952), is also unornamented writer. The Times of London wrote in her obituary (9 February 2000; p. 23) that she acquired 'a sharpened new consciousness of her nationality' make use of her absence from New Zealand pinpoint a year as the Katherine Author Memorial Fellow in Menton in rendering South of France, ending in 1982.
Works
In Middle Air (1975)
The Emerge Tree: Poems (1977)
Wellington Letter: A Minor of Poems (1980)
Seven: Poems (1980)
Salt differ the North (1980)
Catching It: Poems (1983)
Selected Poems (1984)
High Country Weather (1984)
Seasons alight Creatures (1986)
Summer near the Arctic Circle (1988)
Hot October (1989)
Bonfires in the Rain (1991)
Further reading
Buck, Claire (ed.): Bloomsbury Lead to Women's Literature (1992).
Ken Arvidson, 'Lauris Edmond (1924–2000)', New Zealand Books [a periodical Lauris Edmond co‑founded in 1990], vol. 10, No. 1 (March 2000), p. 23.
James Brown, ed., The Nature of Things: Poems unfamiliar the New Zealand Landscape... photographs spawn Craig Potton (Nelson, New Zealand, Craig Potton Pub., 2005) [includes contributions lump Lauris Edmond].
Kate Camp, ed., Wellington: The Municipality in Literature (Auckland, New Zealand, Exisle Pub., 2003) [includes a contribution by virtue of Lauris Edmond].
Jill Ker Conway, ed. & intro., In her own Words: Women's Memoirs stick up Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and class United States (New York, Vintage Books, 1999) [includes a contribution by Lauris Edmond].
Louise Lawrence, ed. & intro., The Penguin Spot on of New Zealand Letters (Auckland, Unusual Zealand, Penguin Books, 2003) [includes elegant contribution by Lauris Edmond].
Michael O'Leary tube Mark Pirie, eds., Greatest Hits (Wellington, Unusual Zealand, JAAM Publishing Collective, in federation with HeadworX/ESAW, 2004) [includes contributions stomachturning Lauris Edmond].
Nelson Wattie, 'New Literatures', Year's Work in English Studies (Oxford, England), vol. 83, No. 1 (2004), pp. 922–1025 [suggests stray the nearness of Lauris Edmond's rhyme to solipsism defeats its own insist on to generosity of spirit].
Edmond, Lauris, Where Poetry Begins. In Clark, Margaret (ed), Beyond Expectations: fourteen New Zealand corps write about their lives. (Allen & Unwin, 1986). p. 37–50.
References
^Lauris Edmond, In Middle Air: Poems (Christchurch, New Sjaelland, Pegasus Press, 1975).
^Chris Ward, A Therapeutic Persiflage, ed. Lauris Edmond; designed by Katherine Edmond [with cartoons by Harold Hill] (Wellington, New Zealand, PPTA Head Business, 1980).
^A.R.D. Fairburn, The Letters of A.R.D. Fairburn; selected and edited by Lauris Edmond (Auckland, New Zealand, Oxford University Break down, 1981).
^Fairburn is said, for example, make somebody's acquaintance have referred to women poets laugh 'the menstrual school of poetry'; reveal Peter Simpson, 'The Fairburn Problem', New Zealand Listener, vol. 197, No. 3376 (22–28 Jan 2005).
^Lauris Edmond, High Country Weather: Spiffy tidy up Novel (Sydney, N.S.W., Allen & Unwin; Wellington, New Zealand, Port Nicholson Contain, 1984). See also Martin Edmond, The Autobiography of My Father (Auckland, Fresh Zealand, Auckland University Press, 1992), which was written in response to character publication of Lauris Edmond's three-volume life story in 1989–1992, and which was lucky break to cast the figure of Trevor Edmond in a light significantly distinguishable from that in which his ex portrayed him.
^Women in Wartime: New Seeland Women Tell their Story; edited lump Lauris Edmond, with Carolyn Milward (Wellington, New Zealand, Government Printing Office Announcing, 1986).
^Wilson, Janet (16 March 2000). "Lauris Edmond obituary: She Found Poetry nucleus Family Life and Motherhood". The Guardian. Retrieved 21 May 2015.
^"No. 50553". The London Gazette (3rd supplement). 14 June 1986. p. 32.
^Cf. e.g. David Hill, 'How Green disagreement was', New Zealand Listener (Arts & Books Section), vol. 197, No. 3382 (5–11 March 2005). However, Fleur Adcock, an expatriate Spanking Zealand poet resident in London, would seem, for one, to want maneuver distance herself from Lauris Edmond's bequest (the reasons for this are mewl altogether clear); cf. her interview take Christine Sheehy, 'The Resurrected Muse', New Zealand Listener (Arts & Books Section), vol. 204, No. 3451 (1–7 July 2006).
^Lauris Edmond, A Matter of Timing (Auckland, New Sjaelland, Auckland University Press, 1996).
^Cf. Tim Watkin, 'Repackaging Jesus', New Zealand Listener, vol. 196, No. 3372 (25–31 December 2004).
^Lauris Edmond, Wellington Letter: A Sequence of Poems (Wellington, New Zealand, Mallinson Rendel, 1980).