Peter Bland

Peter Bland (born 12 May 1934 in Scarborough, North Yorkshire) is a British-New Zealand poet and actor.

Life

He emigrated to New Zealand at the age of 20 and graduated from the Victoria University of Wellington.

He worked as a radio producer for the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation.

He became closely associated with the Wellington Group which included James K. Baxter and Louis Johnson. He worked in theatre, as co-founder and artistic director of Downstage Theatre from 1964–68.

He returned to Britain in 1970.

Awards and honours

• 1977 Cholmondeley Award
• Arvon Foundation International Poetry Competition, England
• 2011 Prime Minister's Awards for Literary Achievement

Works

Plays

• Father’s Day (Wellington, 1966; the first locally-written production at Downstage Theatre)
• George the Mad Ad Man (Wellington, 1967, and Coventry, England, 1969).

Film Acting

• A Touch of the Other (1970)
• Don't Just Lie There, Say Something! (1973)
• Dangerous Orphans (1985)
• Came a Hot Friday (1985)
• Queen City Rocker (1986)

Reviews

Rereading some of these poems after thirty years re-vealed that they have been bivouacking in the backblocks of memory, ready to return at the slightest prompting. One, "The Happy Army," created a memorable stir when published in the NZ Listener. Critics hostile to modernist twentieth-century poetic developments lambasted it as mere prose transfigured into verse-an odd objection, since Bland writes quite traditional poetry. Indeed, the very essence of Bland's poetry is the way a contemporary voice and a modern concern with the itinerant mind never at home even in its own past are communicated in poetry which has regard for stanza, rhyme in the form of assonance and alliteration, and rhythm which never quite becomes metrical.

External links

• "Bland, Peter", New Zealand Book Council
• "Bland, Peter", doollee