This week’s Listener books section is strongly focused on the $60,000 International Institute of Modern Letters prize, which will be awarded on Saturday 13 March.

There’s a revealing interview with Glenn Schaeffer (pictured), the 49-year old American millionaire philanthropist and Las Vegas casino owner who funds New Zealand's richest literary prize. Schaeffer is a man with fingers in many pies, and what seems to be a heart in the right place. He obviously likes New Zealand: he also owns most of Woollaston Estates vineyard in Nelson.

The four authors who will be chewing their fingernails on Saturday are William Brandt, Kate Camp, Glenn Colquhoun and Geoff Cush.

WED 10 MAR UPDATE: The $60,000 Prize in Modern Letters will be announced this Saturday at 5.15-6.30 pm, at the St James Theatre, Courtenay Place, Wellington, as part of Writers and Readers Week. Eric Olsen, US Director of the IIML will speak, and the award will be presented by Associate Arts Minister, Judith Tizard.

Elsewhere in the Listener, Chad Taylor reviews Chronicle Of The Unsung by local writer Martin Edmond. The book has its strengths, but also weaknesses:

As Edmond wanders around Europe and the Pacific, his experiences branch into dense rumination ... Edmond has earned his living as a scriptwriter for the past 20 years and his work sounds better when read aloud. On the page, however, there are too many moments where his observations become muddy with thinking. Stricter editing would have helped.

David Eggleton reviews three recent local releases, Ports Of Call by Peter Bland, Walking The Land by Kevin Ireland and Catullus For Children by Anna Jackson.

Bland's new collection of poems offers

a glamorous travelogue: a voyage around the world in 60-plus poems. That haze of dust may be from the thronging hordes of 21st-century globetrotters descending on yet another beauty spot, but Bland's poetry, with its long-lensed views and sharply focused close-ups, has anticipated them. He gets off the beaten track and, adopting the persona of the amiable wanderer and something of the walk-and-talk style of a travel-show presenter, revisits favourite haunts and out-of-the-way places, among which is New Zealand.

Walking The Land is Kevin Ireland’s 15th collection of poems:

Ireland once again revs up his clipped and sardonic style: lean, limber and fastidiously disciplined … Ireland has a feel for the shapes and contours of New Zealand as a state of mind, with its kneejerk disdain for ostentation, for pretension … He crafts old-fashioned, ballad-like, poems about human behaviour, which you suspect will endure even as the wheel of fashion revolves.

Anna Jackson also draws praise. In this new collection, caught between the two cities of Hamilton and Wellington, she returns to her favourite themes of domestic life, her children, and the Russian poets she loves. Eggleton says

There's a sing-song quality to the lines of her poems in Catullus for Children that makes them seem to vibrate.

Jackson is the poet ever alert to phonetic ambiguities and other forms of wordplay. And she's also very aware of poetry's essentially slippery, deceptive nature. Her poems wear their contradictions and tensions on their collective sleeve.

Jackson has published two previous solo collections, the last of which, The Pastoral Kitchen, was shortlisted for the Poetry section of the Montana Book Awards.