BETWEEN LIGHT AND DARK

Between Light and Dark: Selected Poems 2022-2024
Between Light and Dark brings together 78 poems written during three years of turbulence - in the world and within. Drawing on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Cyclone Gabrielle's devastation of New Zealand's Hawke's Bay, the conflict in Gaza, and the quieter interior landscape of a physician approaching his seventh decade, these poems move between moral witness and philosophical inquiry, between elegy and love, between the clinical precision of a doctor's eye and the openness of a poet who finds wonder in the darkest places.
Harald Edwin Pfeffer writes in the tradition of the physician-poet - with the observational precision of a scientist, the compassion of a healer, and the double vision of an immigrant who left South Africa for Aotearoa New Zealand and has never stopped looking at the world from both sides of that distance. His poems range from the cosmological to the domestic, from quantum physics and the nature of time to trilingual lullabies sung in English, German and Afrikaans.
Organised into five thematic sections - The World on Fire, The Examined Self, Earth & Elegy, Heart & Kin, and No Atom Lost - the collection traces a path from urgent political anger through philosophical self-examination, into the New Zealand landscape, the intimacy of love and family, and finally toward an acceptance of mortality that is neither resignation nor defeat.
"We are caught somewhere / On the spectrum / Of which we perceive so little / Between light and dark."
This is the companion volume to No Atom Lost: Selected Poems 2024-2026. Together the two anthologies form a sustained arc across six years of one life examined honestly, in full.