Through a complementary combination of prose and poetry, Lynn Davidson has crafted an emotionally charged narrative with an awareness for language, rhythm, and form. The three interconnected personal essays and two poems comprising the book share themes of personhood and relationships, often marked by loss—her mother’s Alzheimer’s and the disappearance of her son’s father—as well as a startling self-presence—childhood memories, the experience of pregnancy, and being a mother. Written with the authorial “I,” Common Land is a creatively crafted autobiography.

Lynn Davidson is the author of the poetry collections How to Live by the Sea, Mary Shelley’s Window, and Tender and the novel Ghost Net. Her poetry has been published in The Best of Best New Zealand Poems, The Best of Sport Magazine, Big Weather: Poems of Wellington, and PN Review. She received the Louis Johnson Writer’s Bursary and in 2011 was a visiting artist at Massey University.