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ANDREW JOHNSTON has published three collections of poetry with Victoria University Press: How To Talk (1993), which won the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry and the NZSA Best First Book award; The Sounds (1996); and Birds of Europe (2000). A selected poems, The Open Window, was published for the UK market by Arc in 1999. Johnston now lives in Paris, where he works for the International Herald Tribune.
Johnston comments: ‘“Great Aunt” was discovered down a side-road from a long, obsessive poem called “Roundabout” (forthcoming in Landfall.) I was thinking about how a roundabout looks like a star from above – that’s the star part. How my great aunt came into it, I’m not quite sure. Actually there were two, on my father’s side, who lived together in a house with high ceilings, dark curtains and a cuckoo clock. There was a family story that they had both been engaged to men who didn’t come back from World War I. Their names were Noel and Bede, men’s names, and when I was a small child I heard them as one name, run together, Noelanbede, so perhaps that’s why in the poem they blur into one.’
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