Nicholas Reid

Going South: A road trip through life by Colin Hogg (Harper-Collins, 2016), 272 pp., $34.99

Why, when I look at the cover and start to read this book, do I think of that old advert that used to be on TV about thirty years ago? ‘Life’s a whole long journey, so before you grow too old / Don’t miss the opportunity to strike a little gold. / Out West the folks are fussin’ and the way to make ’em stop / Is to quickly draw your Crunchie Bar and fill ’em full of choc!’

Guess it was that subtitle, ‘A road trip through life’, that made me think: ‘Oh, Lord, here we go with another book about life being a whole long journey. Oh please, Lord, take the cliché away!’ [Read more…]

Michelle Elvy 

52 Men, by Louise Wareham Leonard (Red Hen Press, 2015), 125 pp., $36

Louise Wareham Leonard has a way with men. I mean, she has a way of capturing men, of seeing them, of seeing through them. In her latest book, 52 Men, she pulls together a series of portraits – 52 – of men she has known. The sketches are told through the eyes of Elise McKnight.

And right there we see the first key ingredient of this collection: the way this book traverses the line between fact and fiction. In Leonard’s writerly hands these men are portrayed in ways that seem both truthful and fanciful. The dialogue feels real; the descriptions are precise. The real extends through the whole to create the overall message, something the author includes in an introductory note: ‘People think that life is to not get hurt. But life is to be radical.’ There is everlasting hurt in these pages, but also a kind of bold acknowledgement of the hurt. 18 ends with this: ‘What are you going to do,’ E asks, visiting, reminding me that he cannot leave his wife, ‘about your loneliness?’ [Read more…]

Lindsay Rabbitt

The Dreaming Land by Martin Edmond (Bridget Williams Books, 2015), 164 pp., $39.99

‘The Dreaming Land,’ said Martin Edmond at the launch of this memoir at Wellington’s Unity Books, ‘had its genesis in a failed manuscript.’ He’d set out to write a book about his parents’ early years together, ‘But it hadn’t worked for the obvious reason,’ he says: ‘I wasn’t there.’

He did, however, salvage two sections from the manuscript that did work: one, ‘Barefoot Years’ (initially published as an excellent wee book in BWB Texts), opens The Dreaming Land, and the other, ‘What Instruments We Have Agree’, ends Histories of the Future (2015), a Tasmanian-published collection of Edmond’s inventive prose works illustrated with his partner Maggie Hall’s evocative black and white photographs, and lauded ‘a triumph of originality and daring’ by Peter Pierce in the Sydney Morning Herald. The piece imagines his mother, poet Lauris Edmond, dying alone, aged 75, on 28 January 2000 (the 61st anniversary of W.B. Yeats’ death) in her Oriental Parade home overlooking Wellington Harbour: ‘beyond is the green valley where she once lived with her husband and their children …’ [Read more…]

Denis Harold

The Mermaid Boy by John Summers (Hue & Cry Press, 2015), 158 pp., $30

The Mermaid Boy is a story collection that purports to be non-fiction but reads like fiction. John, a not very roguish young man, writes of youthful adventures in New Zealand and Asia. While he fitfully travels, he gradually matures. The 13 stories/sections/chapters assembled in roughly chronological order generate a kind of picaresque bildungsroman. The author as putative main character has a voice that is humble, sometimes hesitant, unwilling to go beyond what he knows. This is a book not of ego, but definitely of the first person.

It is not a memoir, yet one could piece from it elements of a conventional memoir; not a random selection of autobiographic essays because chronological and narrative threads are loosely tied up; not a meditation on the idea of stories – but almost. [Read more…]