My Thoughts Are All Of Swimming - Poetry Book

We are delighted to present our beloved friend Rose Collin’s stunning debut poetry collection, 'My Thoughts Are All of Swimming'.

Please note this is the second edition of this book, published December 2023, and has a beautiful foreword from her mother Siobhan Collins.

Published by Sudden Valley Press, Otautahi.
Soft cover, 100 pages

This collection of poetry was chosen by Elizabeth Smither as the inaugural winner of the John O’Connor Award, 2022.

In conjunction with the Canterbury Poets’ Collective, the award offers publication to the best first manuscript of a local poet.

Award judge Elizabeth Smither, a New Zealand poet and writer, describes Collins' collection as remarkable; not just for its range or titles or skill, but for the sense it builds of the poet as a personality.
“Whatever the subject, Rose Collins has the enviable ability to be both present and an observer at the same time,” Smither said.

"This highly accomplished, beautifully ordered collection of consistently stunning poems, ranges from the wide-lensed beginning to a focus on the particular, from crater to soup bowl." - Elizabeth Smither, poet, novelist and short story writer.

"Rose has produced a debut collection to celebrate. It moves you to muse and be nourished, to inhabit and settle in poetry clearings. To dawdle and drift as you read. Close your eyes and absorb the music as though you have put on an album, a breathtaking album you want on repeat. There is darkness and there is light, there is the particular and the intangible. My Thoughts Are All of Swimming is a joy to read" - Paula Green, poet, author and reviewer.

Rose was born in New Zealand in 1977, and died after a long illness in May 2023. She was a poet and short fiction writer of Irish descent, an exceptional human who worked as a human rights lawyer before completing the MA in Creative Writing at the IIML in 2010.
She won the 2022 John O’Connor Award and the 2020 Micro Madness Competition, and was shortlisted for the UK Bare Fiction Prize (2016), the Bridport Prize (2020) and the takahē Monica Taylor Poetry Prize (2020). Rose was the 2018 Writer in Residence at Hagley College.

She was an occasional litigation lawyer, a beekeeper and a loving Mama of two.

She is celebrated and held in love by her wonderful whānau in Te Whakaraupō Lyttelton Harbour, on her beloved Banks Peninsula.

You will always keep company in the highest most loving vibration of our hearts Rose ❤️❤️❤️

You can read some beautiful tributes to Rose here

This book was published in NZ