White, Pat

Pat White (b. 1944)

Contents

Aotearoa NZ Poetry Sound Archive (2004):

CD39

1. Before dawn
2. Cats
3. Travelling with our parents
4. Stone poem: springtime, 1984
5. Stone fence
6. The end of February
7. Ditches
8. The single hand is leaving
9. The elegant Chinese bowl
10. Turangawaewae
11. Hunt

Bio / Bibliography

Poet and artist
Born 1944, Tapanui. Living at Gladstone in Wairarapa for past decade.
Presently employed as co-ordinator of the Art Dept at UCOL Wairarapa, in Masterton, I have worked primarily as a teacher and librarian in various part of New Zealand.
My art work is mainly representational oil painting and portraiture, after years spent teaching myself mainly. In recent years I have built a house and developed a ten acre block with my wife Catherine, where we have planted olives and nut trees. Recent writing and painting is very much concerned with time spent at this place, named by local Maori, Wai Toheariki – the place of many underground streams.

Bibliography:

My poetry has always been concerned with place and a sense of contact with place through travel, work, and daily life. Using my own experience and that of others, I have tried to hone in on essential truths. My influences have been poets and other artists, such as; Seamus Heaney, Canadian painter Tom Thomson, Peter Hooper West Coast author, among others. Often the lives they have lived have been as influential as the work. It is important to stand for something as a human being, and for poets to have something to say as they use language. Learning the craft is a life long occupation.


Volumes are: Signposts – Frontier Press, 1977
Bushfall – Pat White, 1978
Cut Across the Grain – Dunedin Public Library, 1980
Acts of Resistance – Longacres Press, 1985
Dark Backward – Wakelin Press, 1994
Drought and other Intimacies – Steele Roberts, 1999
Planting the Olives & other essential acts - Frontiers Press, 2004