Charles Brasch Biography

New Zealand poet, born in Dunedin, educated at Oxford University. He travelled widely in Europe, Africa, and America before finally settling in New Zealand after the Second World War. Together with fellow poet Denis Glover, Brasch was the founding editor of the major New Zealand literary journal Landfall in 1947; he continued his editorship until his retirement in 1966. Landfall Country (1962), edited by Brasch, is a selection from the journal's distinguished contributors. Brasch's early collections of poems, The Land and Its People (1939) and Home Ground (1943), were mythopoeic in tone while in later works, such as The Estate (1957) and Ambulando (1964), a more elegiac tendency exists. These collections were respected at the time for their sincerity, their poised concern for landscape, and their personal/national attitudes (notably in the moving and restrained poem ‘The Islands (ii)’). Collected Poems (1984) allowed a proper appreciation of his achievement. Both Vincent O'Sullivan and Ian Wedde have made significant assessments of Brasch's work. His autobiography, Indirections, appeared in 1980.