Selecting from more than 30 years of poetry to fit into one book was the challenge New Zealand's first Poet Laureate set herself. Michele Leggott's called the collection Mezzaluna. It starts with selections from her 1988 collection Like This? through to her latest one Vanishing Points in 2017.
The books chart the loss of her sight over the years to a point where she's now blind.
She's also an academic, essayist, and editor. And she's the coordinator of the online resource the New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre (nzepc) at the University of Auckland.
Michele Leggott tells Lynn Freeman she enjoyed reacquainting herself with her poems, especially the early ones, as she made her selections.
Mezzaluna Selected Poems by Michele Leggott is published by Auckland University Press, and it's out on the 12th of March.
