www.nzbooklovers.co.nz Chris Reed's review "What emerges most clearly is a writer attentive to what remains. Beyond the Border is concerned with ageing, but it is not preoccupied with decline. It recognises grief, regret and absence, while continuing to find value in conversation, memory, beauty, humour and love. In a literary culture often drawn to novelty, Marshall’s collection offers a different pleasure: the steady intelligence of a writer who has spent a lifetime observing closely, and who still finds language equal to gratitude."
Content in wide, accustomed landscapes
I hear the same wind songs there and bird calls too.
My wanderings have brought me home, a closing
spiral towards the centre of everything I've known.
A new poetry collection from master writer Owen Marshall is always to be celebrated, bringing the welcome promise of the same wisdom, subtlety and wit that have won him such admiration for his award-winning short fiction and novels.
Beyond the Border is no exception. These are poems about the loss of close friends, poems full of memory - and sometimes of regret, poems marked by wry humour and rueful self-deprecation. Many are rich in colour and sensation and close observation of the natural landscape. Many speak of the lasting consolations and pleasures of marriage and family, and of both the vicissitudes of old age and its unexpected joys.
There is a deeply elegiac quality here, but there is also hope, acceptance and contentment in a life widely and thoughtfully lived, and the recognition that what lasts, and what means most, is love.
Owen Marshall is an award-winning novelist, short story writer, poet and anthologist, who has written or edited over 35 books, including the best-selling novel, The Larnachs. He held the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellowship in Menton in 1996 and won the Montana New Zealand Book Awards Deutz Medal for Fiction in 2000, the same year in which he was made an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit. He was made a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2012 and in 2013 received the Prime Minister's Award for Literary Achievement in Fiction.
Three of his works have been adapted for film: The Philosopher, The Rule of Jenny Pen and Coming Home in the Dark, which premiered at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival. Owen Marshall graduated with an MA (Hons) in history from the University of Canterbury, which in 2002 awarded him the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters, and in 2005 appointed him an adjunct professor.