Storms Will Tell

Janet Frame (1924-2004) was one of New Zealand's foremost modern writers, best-known for her prizewinning novels and for the three-volume autobiography later adapted by Jane Campion into her film "An Angel at My Table". Janet Frame called poetry 'the highest form of literature because you can have no dead wood in a poem'. Its attraction is abundantly evident in her novels where her already 'poetic' prose - intensely lyrical, heavily metaphorical - is at times completely pared down to poetry. She published only one collection in her lifetime, "The Pocket Mirror" in 1967, but she never stopped writing poetry, allowing the manuscripts to accumulate in an old fibreglass bowl she'd originally used as a bath for her geese. Her second, posthumous collection "The Goose Bath" (2006) was compiled from this treasure trove, but not published outside New Zealand."Storms Will Tell" is a comprehensive selection of her beautiful and thought-provoking poems drawn from both those books. Her poems illustrate the shape of Janet Frame's life: her childhood and later years in mental hospitals blighted by mis-diagnosis of schizophrenia; her travels around the world, including her time in England; her life as a writer and return to New Zealand; and, growing older and facing illness and death. There are love poems, meditations on mortality, flashes of humour and startling imagery. And always she celebrates the power of the human imagination. Also in 2008: Virago publish "Towards Another Summer", a previously unpublished, short novel by Janet Frame (written in London in 1963), and a new edition of "An Angel at My Table".

Janet Frame was born in Dunedin in 1924. As well as her poetry, she published eleven novels, five collections of stories, a children's book and a three-volume autobiography (adapted by Jane Campion into her film An Angel at My Table). Her posthumous second collection The Goose Bath was published in New Zealand in 2006. It won the prize for best book of poetry at the annual (Montana) New Zealand Book Awards in 2007.2008 sees the publication of Storms Will Tell: Selected Poems from Bloodaxe, and from Virago, the first UK publication of Towards Another Summer, a previously unpublished short novel, written in London in 1963, and first published in New Zealand in 2007, as well as a new edition of An Angel at My Table.Janet Frame won numerous literary awards at home and abroad, was made a CBE in 1983 for services to literature, and received New Zealand's highest civil honour in 1990 when she was made a Member of the Order of New Zealand. In 2003 she was among the inaugural recipients of the Prime Minister's Award for Literary Achievement, was named an Arts Foundation of New Zealand Icon Artist, and was a contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature. She died in 2004.