New Zealand Writers
RICKETTS, Harry
His best are either deftly satiric ‘light’ verse, or wry personal commentaries on the perplexities of love, marriage or parenthood.
Author entry from The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature, edited by Roger Robinson and Nelson Wattie (1998). About the Companion entries View list of Companion contributors
RICKETTS, Harry (1950– ), is a literary scholar, poet and reviewer. Born in London, he grew up in England, Malaysia and Hong Kong, experiences still reflected in his poetry, which is often retrospective. A collection of Hong Kong stories, People Like Us, was published there in 1977. He studied English at Oxford University (MLitt 1975) and lectured at Hong Kong and Leicester before arriving in 1981 to a post at Victoria University, where he pursues a policy of teaching New Zealand poems and stories alongside British and American.He has also done much to encourage student literary work, editing the annual Writings through the 1980s. His first New Zealand publication was an edition that rescued from obscurity *Kipling’s New Zealand story One Lady at Wairakei (1983). His book of interviews with New Zealand poets, Talking About Ourselves (1986), is an essential resource, partly because his subjects’ personalities emerge (for better or worse) in ways that verge on the dramatic.
His technique there of mixing a non-threatening manner with alert perspicacity also informs his reviewing. His own collections of poems are Coming Here (1989), Coming Under Scrutiny (1989), a quarter of the four-poet How Things Are (1996), A Brief History of New Zealand Literature (parodic limericks, 1996) and 13 Ways (1998).
His best are either deftly satiric ‘light’ verse, exploiting rhyme, wordplay and traditional forms like the clerihew or limerick, in a manner more common now in Britain; or wry personal commentaries on the perplexities of love, marriage or parenthood.
He has edited Worlds of Katherine *Mansfield (critical essays, 1991) and Under Review: A Selection from ‘New Zealand Books’ 1991–1996 (with Lauris *Edmond andBill *Sewell, 1997) and is preparing a biography of Kipling and an anthology of New Zealand comic verse.
RR
Updated Information
How You Doing? A Selection of New Zealand Comic and Satiric Verse, editedby Harry Ricketts and Hugh Roberts (Lincoln University Press and Daphne Brasell Publishing, 1998).Ricketts has also published Nothing to Declare: Selected Writings 1977 - 1997 (Headworx, 1998) and his acclaimed biography The Unforgiving Minute: A Life of Rudyard Kipling (Chatto & Windus, 1999).
Jeffrey Paine in the Wall Street Journal writes "[o]f all the Kipling biographies, Harry Ricketts's is the most balanced." While The New Yorker notes that "Ricketts, a poet, is invaluable in analysing the subtleties and the modernist techniques that went into Kipling's popular, accessible work."
Ricketts published a volume of poetry, Plunge in 2001.
Spirit in a Strange Land (2002) is a collection of spiritual poetry co-edited by Ricketts, Paul Morris and Mike Grimshaw. It focuses on a rich vein in New Zealand writing: our spiritual experience.
Spirit in a Strange Land (2002) won the Reference and Anthology Category of the Montana New Zealand Book Awards 2003. It was also shortlisted for the 2003 Spectrum Print Book Design Awards.
Ricketts participated in the 2004 Book Council WOW (Words on Wheels) tour of the deep South.
How to Live Elsewhere (2004) is one of twelve titles in the Montana Estates essay series published by Four Winds Press. The press was established by Lloyd Jones to encourage and develop the essay genre in New Zealand. In his essay Ricketts' reflects on his move from England to New Zealand.
Ricketts co-edited Spirit Abroad: A Second Selection of New Zealand Spiritual Verse with Paul Morris and Mike Grimshaw (Random House, 2004). Spirit Abroad, like its predecessor Spirit in a Strange Land, comprises over 100 poems. These poems explore our continuing struggle to articulate our identity on foreign battlefields, in London and Sydney, Christchurch and Auckland, from Cape Reinga to Bluff.
Spirit Abroad: A Second Selection of New Zealand Spiritual Verse was a finalist in the reference and anthology category of the Montana New Zealand Book Awards 2005.
Your Secret Life is the first full-length collection of Ricketts' poems since his selected writings, Nothing to Declare, was published in 1998. As well as a number of new poems the book also includes poems from his chapbook, Plunge, Pemmican Press, 2001, and several earlier hard-to-find pieces.
In these poems, Harry Ricketts' subjects include the secrets and lies we tell ourselves and the underrated rewards of failure and loss.
Ricketts' How to Catch a Cricket Match (2006) is the ninth title in the Ginger Series from Awa Press.
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