Lauris Edmond Biography

New Zealand poet, born in Hawkes Bay, educated there at Wellington Teachers' College and at Waikato University, Hamilton. Having married and produced five children Edmond was 51 when her first book appeared. Her collections include In Middle Air (1975), The Pear Tree: Poems (1977), Wellington Letter (1980), Seven Poems (1980), Salt from the North (1980), Catching It (1980), Selected Poems (1984), Seasons and Creatures (1986), and Summer Near the Arctic Circle (1988). A lyric poet with a bundle of obsessions that she has refined, developed, and duplicated in all her collections, her concerns are ‘the interpenetrations of the domestic and the intellectual; observations of flora, fauna, families, lovers and loved ones; meditations on birth, love, separation, death…’ (Michele Leggott, in Landfall). One of New Zealand's most popular poets, Edmond is part of the literary scene in Wellington which includes Louis Johnson and Vincent O'Sullivan. She portrays herself as the poet and spokesperson of a generation of women effectively silenced by their responsibilities as wives and mothers; this is the tenor of her autobiographical works Hot October: An Autobiographical Story (1989) and Bonfires in the Rain (1991). A novel, High Country Weather, appeared in 1984.