Download or read book Tigers at Awhitu written by Sarah Broom and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 73 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tigers at Awhitu is a first, compelling, rich, poetry collection by Sarah Broom. With tough, deft attention to language and its emotional power, she asks us to consider our relationships with the world and with words. Hers is an unflinching, original new voice in New Zealand poetry. In February 2008, with the poems in the first half of this book written, Sarah Broom was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer. She was 29 weeks pregnant with her third child. Passionate and intense, yet taut, contained and carefully crafted, the completed collection has become a vehicle for an resolute exploration of life and death, of the spirit and its relationship to the world. Unusually for a New Zealand woman poet, many of Broom's poems emerge out of a profound connection with the New Zealand landscape, which is experienced as both nurturing and menacing, tender and indifferent. Landscape is at once richly natured and post-apocalyptically strange, the context for an exploration of extreme states of spiritual and physical awareness. Other poems chart the drifts and tides of intimate relationships, including the complex ties between mother and child, while the final section of the book takes us through her encounter with her life-threatening illness and her commitment to hope and to a holistic approach to cancer therapies and healing.