Shaggy Magpie Songs is a celebration of poetry's potential- for drama and comedy, narrative and nonsense. Presented in four parts - Praise, Nonsense, Blues and pop - the poems are at times jazzy and rollicking, at other times crooningly melancholic. Murray Edmond is a poet of lyricism and wit, reference and pastiche, thought and meory, all of which he brings in abundance to this collection.

Edmond writes: 'Songs are poems that are incomplete without their music, so I think of these poems as all wanting to get off the page and start singing and dancing. The magpies of Aotearoa are silly ( and slightly dangerous) birds who have given rise to the most profound line in the New Zealand poetry canon: Quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle ... I Like to think the poems are the kind of songs that magpies might sing if they were into making up words: a little bubbly, a little bitter, a little absurd, and echoing with the sound of laughter: songs and shaggy tales to tell.'