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Twenty-five years of poetry by Hutt poet and former army man Keith Westwater celebrated in a new book Join us to celebrate Keith Westwater and his latest book of poetry in Wellington’s newest bookshop. Poets Harry Ricketts, Dinah Hawken and Tim Jones will join Keith at the microphone to read a selection of his work and some of their own. It will be a cosy evening with drinks and nibbles.
The story of the poet’s motherless and peripatetic childhood is told in the poems of No One Home, followed by his time as a boy soldier in Home Base. Sing to Me of Home gathers the best of those poems into one volume along with work from three earlier collections and other poems published and new.
Sing to Me of Home teases apart Keith Westwater’s life with honesty and compassion, wry humour and rage, and applies that same lens to life in Aotearoa. Rugby, the Christchurch earthquakes, colonialism’s impact on native birds and the plight of the rough sleeper of Pōneke jostle each other alongside poems that exalt the everyday and celebrate those places we call home and all the ways they carry us.
Keith Westwater began writing poetry in his early fifties and has five published collections, as well as a volume of new and selected work out in 2026. He was a member of the Tuesday Poem collective, has had work selected for anthologies – including Manifesto Aotearoa: 101 Political Poems and Leaving the Red Zone: poems from the Canterbury earthquakes – and received or been shortlisted for poetry awards in New Zealand, Australia and Ireland.
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Event venue
Aurelia Books, 109 Willis St, Te Aro, Wellington 6011, New Zealand, Wellington
Tickets
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