Cliff Fell
Cliff Fell lives in the Nelson region, where he teaches in the School of Arts and Media at Nelson Marlborough Institute of Technology . His first book of poems was The Adulterer’s Bible , (Victoria University Press , 2003). A second collection, Beauty of the Badlands , is due from VUP in 2008.
Fell comments: ‘ “The M at the End of the Earth” is largely based on notes made while travelling through the US southwest in September and October of 2004, on a trip funded by a Creative New Zealand grant. However, the title of the poem and the key motif the poem is moving towards, are derived from Dante – from Paradiso XVIII, 88-108. The poem also references an image from Purgatorio XXIII, 31-33.
An early draft was written in 2005 for inclusion in Otago University lecturer Roel Wijland ’s Doctoral thesis Poetic Brandscapes – an episodic representation of the beauty and ugliness of contemporary brands as imagined by 13 New Zealand poets . The version here is an expanded version which was published by Elsewhere Press in 2007 in Hotspot , an artists’ book to accompany a joint and collaborative exhibition of paintings, text and video work by Kate Walker, Jennifer Beth Guerin and the author, which was held at the Suter Gallery in Nelson in August, 2007.’
