Buy now from Otago University Press.
Shortlisted for the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards 2024.
New Zealand Listener Best Verse of 2023.
At the Point of Seeing is the extraordinary debut collection from Ōtepoti Dunedin poet Megan Kitching. Poised, richly observant and deftly turned, Kitching’s poems bestow a unique attention upon the world. Her eye is finely attuned to the well-trodden yet overlooked – the places between ‘dirt and thumb’ or ‘together and alone’ – and especially the weedy, overgrown and pest-infested places where the human impulses to name, control and colonise meet nature’s life force and wild exuberance. These compelling poems urge the reader to slow down and give space to the living, moving, breathing environment that surrounds them.
… the garden is making something of you, situated on the border of dirt and thumb, the corner with its stepover wall where two streets grow neighbourly and flora and animal meet. — from ‘Growing Advice’
Reviews
Paula Green on Poetry Shelf:
We are at the point of seeing, we are at the point of speaking, sharing, hoping, and poetry such as this, poetry as good as this, makes all the difference.
NZ Booklovers’ Chris Reid: At the Point of Seeing ‘offers a richly observant and nuanced perspective on the natural world.’
The end of the world: a debut collection on ‘the fragility of the earth under our feet’: Linda Collins for the Aotearoa New Zealand Review of Books.
Two reviews by Nicholas Reid: a wide-ranging piece on his blog, Reid’s Reader, and a shorter response published in the NZ Listener (12 August 2023):
Laura Williamson’s review for 1964: mountain culture / aotearoa:
Interviews and Audio
Listen to three poems from the collection on Paula Green’s Poetry Shelf blog.
An interview with the online magazine Kete on writing, my background, and the nature of the relationship between science and the arts.
I spoke to Jeff Harford on Otago Access Radio’s Write Spot about At the Point of Seeing, writing, and being inspired by the people and places of Ōtepoti Dunedin.
A conversation with Ruth Todd on Plains FM’s Bookenz show about nature poetry, the arts and the sciences, and Ruth’s thoughts on At the Point of Seeing. I also read three poems from the collection.