Murray Edmond Biography

New Zealand poet, playwright, and critic, born in Hamilton, educated at the University of Auckland. He has since worked in the theatre while continuing to write poetry. Edmond was published in Landfall while still at school, and in the early 1970s he was the editor of several issues of the ‘messianic’ and important though short-lived magazine The Word is Freed, which was very much the vehicle of a generation of young poets in the late 1960s which included Bill Manhire and Ian Wedde. Wedde describes Edmond's poems as ‘rhapsodic and linguistically dense’ and as having ‘dramatic and narrative qualities which owe much to his life in theatre’. Edmond's interest in personal and domestic themes is related to wider intellectual concerns, such as the ‘presence’ of local histories, and indigenous and other literatures. Stylistically, Edmond shows an increasing commitment to innovation and experiment. Collections of poems include Entering the Eye (1973), Patchwork (1978), End Wall (1981), Letters and Paragraphs (1987), and From the Word Go (1992). The Switch (1994) is an experimental long poem in fortynine parts on love and transience. He has also written short plays for children, a full-length musical A New South Pacific, and critical work on New Zealand drama and poetry; with Mary Paul he edited an anthology, The New Poets: Initiatives in Recent New Zealand Poetry (1987).