About the book
The view is best on the edge of
the skyline track,
the telegraph pole,
this life you like to think is yours.
The view is out of this world.
The gannet dives
and it’s all over for the silver fish.
Six years after Michael, I Thought You Were Dead, Michael Fitzsimons continues to be surprised by being alive and the way ordinary things are extraordinary because he’s still here to see them. There’s the intimate world of his hillside home with Rose overlooking Wellington Harbour, and the wider world where friends and whānau live, and miseries, as Suzanne Aubert said, ‘ride behind us on horseback’. Everywhere Michael looks, life is both precious and precarious: a thrilling high-wire existence. Some of the best lines of High Wire are simply that – a handful of words on a page to mark something fleeting that will make a reader laugh or puzzle or wonder. You can’t ask more of poetry than that.
“These poems are ‘worldly’ in the finest sense: they are ‘full of bounce and soft foliage’; there are mysteries aplenty, sensory pleasures and a seagull-flock of epiphanies. Get ye to this Mystic Kitchen!”—Gregory O’Brien
“Michael Fitzsimons has the uncanny ability to transform moments, memories and life’s fragments into something out of the marvellous, thereby doing the necessary work of poets and poetry – nourishing our existence.”—Peter Biggs
“Enfolded into these notes on life’s small astonishments is poetry porous enough to give air to both peculiarities and the everyday. Wherever the exuberance of a thrilling, high-wire existence communes with the intimacy of flames from a fire on a beach at the bright edge of the world, that is where these poems hum and blaze.”—Kay McKenzie Cooke
Michael Fitzsimons has published two previous books of poetry. His first collection Now You Know was recommended in RNZ’s annual poetry highlights. His second collection, Michael, I thought you were dead, dealt with a cancer diagnosis and was described by Joy Cowley as ‘a feast for the soul’. Michael is a professional writer and member of the three-person South Wellington Poetry Society. He was co-founder of the Wellington communications and publishing company, FitzBeck Creative. He lives with his wife, Rose, in Seatoun on a hill overlooking the harbour. They have three children spread from Wellington to Warsaw to upstate New York.
