Erik Kennedy 

Always Song in the Water by Gregory O’Brien (Auckland University Press, 2019), 264pp., $45; Mary Shelley Makes a Monster by Octavia Cade (Aqueduct Press, 2019), 88pp., US$12; A Year of Misreading the Wildcats by Orchid Tierney (The Operating System, 2019), 108pp., US$24

A book about New Zealand’s remoteness from the rest of the world is timely right now. The fact that it has nothing to do with pandemics or politics is a blessed relief. Gregory O’Brien’s Always Song in the Water is an artist’s journal of dozens of sparkling essaylets, poems and artworks that together advance the thesis that Aotearoa New Zealand is first and foremost a Pacific nation. Based around two trips that O’Brien took to some of the farther-flung outposts of New Zealand’s territory—a road trip in Northland and a sea voyage to the Kermadecs—the book argues for an ‘archipelagic concept’ of nationhood. Only one-seventeenth of New Zealand is dry land, if you take into account its exclusive economic zone, and O’Brien makes a strong case that it is the sea that gives coherence to our lives and art. [Read more…]

Siobhan Harvey

Friday Prayers by Tony Beyer (Cold Hub Press, 2019), 40pp., $19.50; By the Lapels by Wes Lee (Steele Roberts, 2019), 76pp., $25; Neon Daze by Amy Brown (Victoria University Press, 2019), 143pp., $25; Moral Sloth by Nick Ascroft (Victoria University Press, 2019), 80pp., $25

Tony Beyer’s Friday Prayers proves the truth of that old adage: big things come in small packages. A chapbook, forty pages and five poems long perhaps, but therein lies such mastery of concept, language, form and evocation that it seems larger and longer, packing more cerebral punch than the sum of its parts.

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Anne Kennedy 

Back Before You Know by Murray Edmond (Compound Press, 2019), 80 pp., $20; Conventional Weapons by Tracey Slaughter (Victoria University Press, 2019), 95 pp., $25

These two engrossing and unique collections are evidence of great variety in our poetry scene, but they are also fascinating to look at side by side because they each inhabit Pākehā Gothic—in quite different ways. Murray Edmond’s cheerfully titled Back Before You Know is set in a heady historical bush-world of hard yakka, violence and romance, while Tracey Slaughter’s Conventional Weapons eviscerates the moments, big and small, of a suburban Kiwi girl. Both volumes, in true Gothic style, are dark, funny and rhetorical.  [Read more…]

Janet Newman

By Sea Mouths Speaking: Collected poems 1973–2018 and related prose by Denys Trussell (Brick Row, 2019), 784pp, $75

It is hard to remember the time when human entanglement with the environment was not at the forefront of our minds. Yet only forty years ago, Denys Trussell’s ecological sequence of poems ‘Dance of the Origin’ was ‘outside the dominant view’ of New Zealand contemporary dance, for which it was written. The performance of Trussell’s poetic sequence explored ‘the body as nature; the body as ecological entity within larger ecological processes’, says Origins Dance Theatre founder Alison East, in an essay in this collection – ideas which in 1980 contrasted with ‘the dominant view of human beings as separate from and superior to all aspects of nature’ (532). [Read more…]