Moth Hour

Author(s): Anne Kennedy

NZ Poetry

The family didn’t know what to do about grief. The noisy house went silent. I was fourteen. I lay on the red rug in the sitting room and listened to Beethoven’s Thirty-Three Variations on a Waltz by Anton Diabelli, op. 120 – over and over because it was there.  In 1973, Anne Kennedy’s brother Philip was partying on a hillside when he accidentally fell to his death. Among books and records, Philip left a poem typed in Courier on thick, cream, letter-sized paper. Come catch me little child / And put me in a jar . . .  In Moth Hour, Anne Kennedy returns to the death of her brother and the world he inhabited, writing ‘Thirty-Three Transformations on a Theme of Philip’ and concluding with a longer poem, ‘The Thé’.  Kennedy’s extraordinary poems grapple with the rebellious world of her brother and his friends in the 1970s; with grief and loss; with the arch of time. The poems reach into the threads of the past to build patterns, grasped for a moment and then unravelling in one’s hands.  Moth Hour is a complex, ambitious piece of writing and a moving poetic engagement with tragedy.

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Shortlisted for the Ockham NZ Book Awards - Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry 2020

‘This is subtle, moving and ingenious writing, occupying the mind in patterns that form, dissolve and reform – like the shapes of grief itself.’ – Tom Bishop 

Moth Hour is an extraordinary work by one of our most original and gifted writers. Starting as a simple act of mourning and remembering, unfolding through multiple forms and voices, musical or vernacular, it swells into a moving celebration of art and the imagination. You will want to read it again and again.’ – Elizabeth Caffin

Anne Kennedy is a writer of fiction, screenplays and poetry. Sing-Song won Poetry Book of the Year at the 2004 Montana New Zealand Book Awards, The Time of the Giants was shortlisted for the same award in 2006, and The Darling North won the 2013 NZ Post Book Award for Poetry. Her novels include The Last Days of the National Costume, shortlisted for the NZ Post Book Award for Fiction in 2014, and The Ice Shelf, longlisted in the 2019 Ockham NZ Book Awards. She lives in Auckland.   

General Fields

  • : 9781869408947
  • : Auckland University Press
  • : Auckland University Press
  • : 0.199581
  • : September 2019
  • : ---length:- '9'width:- '6.75'units:- Inches
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Anne Kennedy
  • : Paperback
  • : English
  • : 821.3
  • : very good
  • : 104