The Commonplace Odes was the first collection in eight years from major New Zealand poet Ian Wedde. It is a stunning collection: a group of odes, deliberately patterned but expressed in an easy, warm, contemporary voice, prefaced by an epode which, like a musical overture, traverses the themes and phrases of the work to follow, interspersed with two epistles light in tone and concluded with a moving song of lament and hope. Connections with Wedde's earlier verse are evident – the enormous pleasure in the rich world of senses, for example – but these poems also show the gravity and wisdom of an older man beginning to think about age, death and the passing of the generations.