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‘The title is beautifully apt for the collection. The poems

take the reader deep into the heart of loss and love, into the

reality of mortality, into life’s mystery and its sorrow. The

collection as a whole is an unflinching examination of

distance and the effect of ‘distancing’ and ‘departures’ on

personal identity––a probing of how personal identity sits

within notions of national, cultural and family kinships

when departures disrupt a hitherto closed circle. It’s an

intimate collection and deeply human.’ ––Sue Wootton

‘A classic settler narrative.’

––Peter Simpson on the title sequence.

'I have been reading with profound enjoyment your new book Departures: it is delightful to read, and the poems resonate in the memory. Given much of the subject

matter, I think you may indeed have written a classic of New Zealand literature as well as a fine addition to the canon of modern poetry on an important range of

experience. It feels to me that your work has really come into its own: this is accomplished and solid work, poetry often of great beauty.'  ––Grevel Lindop

Born in Dunedin in 1942, Dunstan Ward studied at the University of Canterbury, then taught at Waikato University. In 1971 he left for London, and in 1973 settled

in Paris, retiring as Professor of English at the University

of London Institute in Paris in 2007; he still teaches a weekly seminar at the Paris centre of Columbia University (New York). With Beryl Graves, the poet’s widow, he edited the Complete Poems of Robert Graves. Departures is his third poetry collection.