New Publication

Leicester Kyle's Koroneho is an epic poem about botany. Taking as his subject matter the life and explorations of pioneer missionary, printer, and naturalist William Colenso (1811-1899) - whose Maori name was "Koroneho" - Kyle expertly weaves letters, historical details, and the language of botanical description into a strangely compelling mixture, a little like that other long Modernist poem "containing history" Ezra Pound's Cantos.

The Rev. Leicester Kyle (1937-2006) was in many ways a fitting match for the object of his fascination, Colenso. Trained as a botanist, he entered the Anglican church in his twenties, only to take early retirement in his fifties after converting to a new religion: poetry. His initial fascination with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry and Postmodern American poetics was succeeded by a rather more relaxed sense of the indigenous and anecdotal in the later work composed after his move to Millerton on the West Coast in the late 90s.

Abstract:

When poet, priest and environmental activist Leicester Kyle died in 2006, he asked poet David Howard and myself to act as his literary executors. In accordance with the trust he placed in us, a website has now been set up at http://leicesterkyle.blogspot.com/ which we hope will (eventually) contain all of his extant work in electronic form, together with critical material. The first major unpublished text I put up online was Kyle’s Modernist verse epic Koroneho, about the life and work of pioneering nineteenth-century botanist and missionary William Colenso.

This print publication of the poem has been undertaken at the instigation of Ian St George of the Colenso Society, who has also contributed a preface. It consists of a “reading edition” of the online text, edited with an introduction by me. The design of the book is intended to evoke Colenso’s own paperback publications, from his pioneer printing press in Paihia.