Roll & Break
Adrienne Jansen
What defines a place like Tītahi Bay? The rolling waves, the turning tide, the crescent-cleft coast?
It’s the people. It’s the stories handed down through generations. It is this rugged beauty that links us to each other.
Roll & Break is a collection of poems about Tītahi Bay, north of Wellington. But they are not your usual beach poems. An African refugee staggers from the ocean; Van Gogh is painting boatsheds; a violinist plays in a dinghy to an audience of gulls. Roll & Break is a collection full of surprises, and a celebration of the beaches at the heart of our Aotearoa life.
Roll & Break is the latest reminder of what a special poet she is. – Harry Ricketts
There is something for everyone especially those of us who live or have lived in the Bay. – Karl Campbell, Life member of Titahi Bay Surf Lifesaving Club.
In this fourth collection, Adrienne returns to an established interest in the water, its intensity, force, lure, liberation, hazard and worship. What results are dynamic poems which, like their seascapes, offer tranquillity, depth and undertow. – Siobhan Harvey
Roll & Break is a sharp, vivid portrait of a place. The poet pulls us with her onto the beach, ‘all the ordinary brilliance of it’ in poems filled with memory, breath, water, and a chorus of voices. Layers of history, culture, geography and environmental change all converge here; each poem is a kind of landing place, a turning towards home. – Nina Mingya Powles
Available from landingpressnz.com and nationwidebooks.co.nz.