Occasionally, you get a little reminder that New Zealand is a special place to call home. Mine came on Wednesday morning at 7.10am, when I wheeled my luggage trolley out of Auckland airport and into the crisp morning air. After ten days of meetings, air-conditioning, traffic fumes and sensory overload in New York, New Zealand felt like a good place to be.

A complementary surprise was waiting at home: two enticing new volumes from Craig Potton, the man who captures the visual wondrousness of our country more consistently than anyone else.

The Nature of Things is an anthology, expertly edited by James Brown. It matches Potton’s own photography with poems by the past giants and contemporary contenders of New Zealand literature, from James K Baxter to Ian Wedde.

It’s a simple concept, but beautifully executed. The interplay between the words and the pictures is intriguing, and on occasion, astounding. For me, the start of Brian Turner’s Place sums up both the book and the feelings it engenders:

Once in a while
you may come across a place
where everything
seems as close to perfection
as you will ever need.

One of the other poems in The Nature of Things is Janet Frame’s Snow, which leads us neatly to the second book: The Southern Alps. This is in more conventional Potton territory, fitting the popular image of Potton as a dramatic landscape lensman. This is a book built for the coffee table, with powerful images that speak for themselves: mostly of snowy peaks, but occasionally of a more abstract nature.

It’s pure eye candy, and I don’t mean that in a derogatory sense: these are harsh but beautiful places captured by one of our finest landscape photographers. The Southern Alps will sit happily next to my treasured copy of Thomas Flechtner’s Snow, just as Coldplay’s Parachutes lives next to Radiohead’s OK Computer.