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Celebrated New Zealand writer Janet Frame used to keep geese, using the base of an old garden fountain as their bath. In later years the geese went but the bath was brought indoors as a receptacle into which Janet piled her poems and jottings as she reworked and developed them. Over time the goose bath overflowed with paper, including hundreds of unpublished poems. By the time Janet died in 2004 she had named her hoped-for but elusive new selection 'The Goose Bath'. From this treasure trove was selected over a hundred poems that illustrated the shape of her life: her childhood and the subsequent difficult years in mental hospitals; her travels around the world; her life as a writer, growing older and facing illness and death. The poems reveal her love for words, for cats, for the changing seasons, the arts and for her native country. There are love poems, meditations on mortality, flashes of humour and startling imagery. And always she celebrates the power of the human imagination.
The Goose Bath: Poems | 
