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.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 80

Dimensions: 150 x 230 mm

Publication Date: 20-03-2018

From Sean Macgregor's lounge occupied by stoned youths, to three bank robbers en route to the Penrose ANZ, Michael Steven's second collection presents his clear, clean vision of 'the lifers' who inhabit these islands and beyond.A generation's subterranean memories of post-Rogernomics New Zealand are a linking thread, in the decades straddling the millennium, while other poems echo with the ghostly voices of the dead, disappeared and forgotten. Steven's writing neither patronises nor romanticises in its intricate depictions of small worlds of violence, despair, love and struggle. Always it refers back to the redemption of human connection as its magnetic pole.Dawn is a fire show of gold and hot white, blasting the darkness off the isthmus.In two hours, I will land in your city.I am made of atoms and they are dancing.

Pages: 92

Dimensions: 150 x 230 mm

Publication Date: 01-03-2020

It’s a clear night. Hamish and Wiremu crack stubbies of Waikato Draught. Burn what’s left from the outdoor season. Words between them are slow in coming. When they do come, they are spare and pointed. Tomorrow they will load rams on the Isuzu into a holding pen made from old pallets, for a man in Weymouth to fatten for Ramadan. It’s a clear night. Orion hurls his belt and sword into a pool of creosote. For Hamish, it will always be The Dipper. The beer is warm. The weed makes them cough. On the town side of the city border gridded fields of diodes glow and hum. – Dropped Pin: Razorback Road, Pōkeno Winner of the Kathleen Grattan Poetry Award 2021, poet Michael Steven’s Night School explores the gap between fathers and sons, the effects of toxic masculinity, how power corrupts and corrodes, and whether weed, art and aroha can save us in a godless world. ‘This is the poet as pilgrim, traveller, and astonished survivor. His sonorous verse has an impeccable lapidary quality, each word fitted like a stone in a wall. Phrase by phrase, sentence by sentence, writing with a lucid precision, Michael Steven patiently builds up his world view, always making sure we are with him, always allowing us to share the understanding.’ – David Eggleton, Judge’s Report Kathleen Grattan Poetry Award 2021

Bind: paperback

Publication Date: 25-03-2022