Walking to Jutland Street

Discover 'Walking to Jutland Street', the compelling debut collection by Auckland poet Michael Steven, published by Otago University Press. This poignant paperback, sized at 150 x 230 mm and featuring 80 pages of rich, evocative poetry, invites readers to explore the essence of friendship and the human experience. The title refers to the artist's journeys through Dunedin’s industrial landscape, encapsulating vibrant evenings spent navigating the city with friends. Each poem transports you into bizarre yet familiar scenarios, vividly portraying the complexity of urban life. Michael Steven's verses span a multitude of themes - from surreal encounters and portraits of gritty urban realities to tender love poems and heartfelt reflections on family and childhood. Explore the depth of human emotion through Steven's unique lens, be it the struggles of drug dealing teenagers, the haunting presence of night shelter inhabitants, or the whispers of lost explorers. His work is not just poetry; it's a reflection of a life teeming with connections, mysticism, and literary heritage. Perfect for anyone seeking to delve into contemporary New Zealand poetry marked by authenticity and a rich narrative style, 'Walking to Jutland Street' promises a profound literary journey.

Author: Michael Steven Publisher: Otago University Press
Bind: paperback
Dimensions: 150 x 230 mm
Pages: 80
Publication Date: 20-03-2018

Walking to Jutland Street is the impressive first book-length collection by up-and-coming Auckland-based poet Michael Steven. The title refers to Dunedin’s industrial wharf precinct where some of the poet’s friends shared a flat in 2010. A poem about friendship in the face of the other, ‘Walking to Jutland Street’ vividly recreates their evening ‘constitutional’ from the flat via the bridge over train tracks to the city and back, with its inebriated, surreal, sometimes nightmarish inhabitants. Other poems deliver snapshots of the human condition through bizarre personalities such as the subject of ‘Dropped Pin: Jollie Street’, ‘a man who proclaimed to function / best in a state close to coma’. Still others are tender love poems, travel poems (in 2016 the poet slept in the last bedroom of explorer Vasco da Gama), poems about family or childhood memory. A poet of gritty, day-to-day urban New Zealand reality (whether depicting teenage drug dealing, alcoholics or the night shelter), Steven is equally a writer steeped in literary tradition, Buddhist mysticism and world-historical narrative. His is a voice that aspires to capture quotidian experience or personality as a phenomenon implicitly of all times and places. In this pursuit, his literary cousins are Olds, Orr, Mitchell, Dickson, Johnson and Baxter.