In The Midnight Plane, Dame Fiona Kidman, one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s most distinguished writers, returns to her first and deepest literary love, poetry. This beautifully curated volume opens with selected work from Kidman’s six previous collections, chronologically ordered, and concludes in the present day with a body of exciting new poems.

The Midnight Plane comes in to land exactly half a century after the 1975 publication of Kidman’s debut book, the poetry collection Honey and Bitters. There’s a sense in which The Midnight Plane works like an alternative memoir, offering a poet’s immediacy of vision and gift of linguistic precision on a life unfolding in real time. From the first line to the last, The Midnight Plane speaks to human relationships, to connection and disconnection, to the mystery and the majesty of life, to seasons of loss and cycles of renewal. Each of these poems is, in its own way, a midnight plane, flying in the dark, navigating for home in sometimes perilous conditions. ‘What I know,’ writes Kidman in her generous preface to this landmark collection, ‘is that poetry has the power to shake the heart’.

Here it comes swooping
against the stars, perfectly poised
above the unruly winds …

from ‘The midnight plane’