Tunui Comet is the first collection in more than a decade by one of our most important living Maori poets. Rolling easily between korero Maori and the canonical traditions of English-language poetry, through karakia and powhiri, treaty training and decolonisation wikis, Robert Sullivan takes readers on a marvellous poetic hikoi. Guided by Maui and Tawhirimatea, Moana Jackson and Freddie Mercury, we walk from K'Rd council flats to Kaka Point, finding ourselves and our ancestors along the way.
"'Tunui Comet displays all the elegance, eloquence and craft one would expect from this Maori writer, who is one of the outstanding poets of his generation. This is a distinctive and rich collection about unity and location, using the compass of poetry to celebrate our archipelago of islands. Robert Sullivan has deftly fused the classicism of the European tradition with Maori animism and a new world wonder, even as he defamiliarises the ordinary.'"
David Eggleton
"'Sullivan's work is like a great camera: an eye in the sky that shows us all of who we are, then zooms right in to the specifics of the individual within the wider Maori identity. Under this Tunui we are both the individual and the collective; the past and the future entwined in the poet's words. Sullivan is shapeshifter, time traveller, descendant and ancestor. We are all welcomed into the wharenui that this book has become.'"
