The Land and the People, and Other Poems

1939

Brasch PR9640 B67 L3

Christchurch: Caxton Press

Charles Brasch was about nine and staying at Henley-on-Taieri when he wrote his first poems on the subject of briar roses. As a self-confessed ‘wooly-minded scribbler’ of ‘worthless Georgian-romantic verse’, Brasch continued writing. In 1939, Caxton Press published The Land and the People and Other Poems, his first volume of verse in an edition of 100 copies. Brasch had once written: ‘It was New Zealand I discovered, not England, because New Zealand lived in me as no other country could live, part of myself as I was part of it, the world I breathed and wore from birth, my seeing and my language’ (Indirections). The Land and the People (II), and its sequences, are part of his personal scrutiny.