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Searching, remarkable poems – about art, about location, about unusual expeditions, and about love.

The poems in The Glass Rooster explore the spaces inhabited by humans and other creatures - not just natural ecosystems like deserts or the alpine zone, but cities and outer space. Each of the eight sections (or 'echo-systems') in the book - 'The Damp Places', 'Forest', 'Cityscape', 'The Alpine Zone', 'Space', 'Home & Garden', 'Underground' and 'In the Desert' - is introduced by a triolet, a French poetic form with repeated lines. Other poems are arranged in pairs, each echoing something about the other, whether desert plants, the presence of balloons or the dangers of working in a mine. The result is a tremendous, riotous exploration of an interconnected world. Our guide on this journey is a glass rooster - observer of stars and lover of hens - who first popped up in Janis Freegard's poetry years ago and wanders unchecked through the book. These are searching, remarkable poems - about art, about places, about unusual expeditions, and about love.

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Reviews

…takes the reader on a strange remarkable journey through underground caverns, mountains and into outer space. These poems are searching, meaningful, painful and uncompromising. – Hamish Wyatt, Otago Daily Times

While one section is called ‘Underground’, there is nothing subterranean about these poems. The over-riding quality is that of brightness—something Keely O’Shannessy’s cover design reflects well. This is a bright bird of a book. You could think of the poet’s sensibility as a beak-like apparatus, prodding, sifting and sometimes swallowing things whole. – Greg O’Brien

The poems in Janis Freegard's new collection, The Glass Rooster explore the spaces inhabited by humans and other creatures - not just natural ecosystems like deserts and mountains, but also cities and outer space. The reader's guide is the glass rooster of the title- observer of stars and lover of hens - which wanders unchecked through the book. — North and South