Storms Will Tell: Selected Poems

Janet Frame (1924-2004) was one of New Zealand's foremost modern writers, best-known for her prizewinning novels and for the three-volume autobiography later adapted by Jane Campion into her film "An Angel at My Table". Janet Frame called poetry 'the highest form of literature because you can have no dead wood in a poem'. Its attraction is abundantly evident in her novels where her already 'poetic' prose - intensely lyrical, heavily metaphorical - is at times completely pared down to poetry. She published only one collection in her lifetime, "The Pocket Mirror" in 1967, but she never stopped writing poetry, allowing the manuscripts to accumulate in an old fibreglass bowl she'd originally used as a bath for her geese. Her second, posthumous collection "The Goose Bath" (2006) was compiled from this treasure trove, but not published outside New Zealand."Storms Will Tell" is a comprehensive selection of her beautiful and thought-provoking poems drawn from both those books. Her poems illustrate the shape of Janet Frame's life: her childhood and later years in mental hospitals blighted by mis-diagnosis of schizophrenia; her travels around the world, including her time in England; her life as a writer and return to New Zealand; and, growing older and facing illness and death. There are love poems, meditations on mortality, flashes of humour and startling imagery. And always she celebrates the power of the human imagination. Also in 2008: Virago publish "Towards Another Summer", a previously unpublished, short novel by Janet Frame (written in London in 1963), and a new edition of "An Angel at My Table".