Title: Here Be Dragons
Author: Shelley Arlidge
Pocket Book No 9

Here be dragons, gathering in swarms. This world made of words is like a fire.

Praise for Shelley’s book

Arlidge’s poems are fires in small grates in cosy houses, where witches and wizards, Tangaroa and Poseidon, and Odysseus and Penelope are apt to drop by for a chinwag, a cuppa, or a slice of freshly buttered toast.

The domestic is imbued with a mythical strangeness that we recognise in our startled way, as if seeing the ordinary thing for the first time–and it is extraordinary.

Johanna Aitchison

Unexpected and sharply observed, these poems quietly gather on the page, starting with a stream of light, ripples, a small translation. Here are human and natural worlds colliding. And Herzog!
Here be dragons: Arlidge’s lines carry a sense of danger, and possibility. Listen for the sparks. Find the shine buried under excrement. See the nearly hidden warning on the side of the road. Watch these carefully collected words as they creep towards us,
hot, crackling.

Michelle Elvy

About the Author

(Ngāpuhi) lives in Kororāreka, Russell. Semi-retired now, she has previously worked as an administrator, museum curator, gardener, medical receptionist and shoemaker.This is her first book.

Earlier versions of some of these poems have been published in: Landfall, Poetry NZ Yearbook, Fast Fibres and Russell Review. While she was studying towards her MCW, Shelley’s poem There is no river, Neo won Massey University’s Frean Prize.