Family Songbook

“Newton is blessed with the kind of keen eye that can spot the flush on a black-backed gull’s bill and ‘the chill pewter light on the snowgrass.’ Hard looking informs these poems as well as hard thinking and magpie reading. A splendid wry wit guides and shapes the book. . . . We all carry in our heads private landscapes—the geography of our youth refracted by memory, changing hopes and desires, personal mythology, family history. Newton’s songbook re-examines and revitalizes half-forgotten possibilities.” — Iain Sharp, reviewer, critic, and columnist, New Zealand Listener magazine