Chris Tse
Summer Grass by Ginny Sullivan (Steele Roberts, 2017), 72 pp., $19.99; Edgeland and Other Poems by David Eggleton (Otago University Press, 2018), 112 pp., $27.50; View from the South by Owen Marshall with photographs by Grahame Sydney (Vintage, 2018), 208 pp., $40
It feels somewhat reductive in 2019 to be framing a review of three New Zealand poetry books with the poets’ shared exploration of place and landscape, but here we are. However, that is not to say that these three books are themselves reductive in any sense. So much of our country’s art is rooted in the land – I can still hear my university lecturers exalting the pivotal role that our celebrated landscape has played in the development of our national literature and film history. And if it’s not our own land then it’s the far-flung places we Kiwis end up in, a shared wanderlust pushing us to escape the confines of our island nation, our isolation. [Read more…]