Sidelights: Rugby Poems
by Mark Pirie
Sidelights features poems about the All Blacks, Super and provincial rugby, women’s rugby and the author’s own rugby family.
First published as a limited edition hand-bound booklet in 2013, this new enlarged edition contains rugby poems from the past four years and is accompanied by historian Ron Palenski’s informative foreword.
The book’s title “Sidelights” comes from an Eden Park rugby column of the same name in the Auckland Weekly News, 1930s.
Wellington writer and editor Mark Pirie’s poems, written between 1993 and 2017, have been widely published in journals, anthologies and newspapers such as Ron Palenski’s Touchlines: An Anthology of Rugby Poetry (NZ Sports Hall of Fame, 2013), Under Flagstaff: Dunedin Poetry (Otago University Press, 2004) and The Dominion Post.
"Mark Pirie has captured rugby’s moods and eras in this small book of his fine poetry; there’s barely a peep from a referee’s whistle as he flits from old to new and back again; from some great players to others, such as his grandfather Tom Lawn, not himself a great player but a player of the type which made the game great. And if the astute reader picks up a flavour that could have been brewed in Wellington, that’s all part of rugby’s charm, its tribalism." - Ron Palenski, from the Foreword
This title is also available from Lulu in paperback and eBook (see the HeadworX Shop).
| Title | Sidelights |
|---|---|
| Author | Mark Pirie |
| Release | November 2017 |
| Category | NZ Poetry |
| Format | Paperback |
| Extent | 80 pages |
| ISBN | 978-0-473-40868-8 |
| Price | NZ$20.00 |