Steeped in the brilliance of the banal and the daily splendours of language, Wedde presents a beautifully controlled and ordered sequence of verse in Tendering: New Poems. The book was written, he says, ‘in the ghostly presence of my great grandfather Heinrich Augustus Wedde, the last ship-rig pilot on Wellington harbour’. Powerful visions of ships, the sea and of Pacific voyages of exploration pervade the collection, as does that mean city to where the ships return home.