Anahera Gildea

Wayfinder by Jan FitzGerald (Steele Roberts Aotearoa, 2017), 62 pp., $24.99; People from the Pit Stand Up by Sam Duckor-Jones (Victoria University Press, 2018), 112 pp., $30; Poūkahangatus by Tayi Tibble (Victoria University Press, 2018), 80 pp., $20

In modern parlance, the word waka is used to describe your vehicle, your mode of transport, your craft, but it also refers to your ancestral canoe and your tribe; it can be the word used to indicate a flight of birds, and it can be the medium for atua or spirits. These three collections of poetry may initially seem to have little in common, yet once inside, you realise you are in each case afloat on a waka, carefully navigated by a deft hand. Navigation itself is one of the key preoccupations of any sea people, and is an apt metaphor for all three of these books. Jan FitzGerald’s Wayfinder calls directly on ancestral connections, both animate and inanimate, to point the way; Sam Duckor-Jones ‘paddles out at dawn’; and Tayi Tibble (Te Whānau o Apanui, Ngāti Porou) uses the significant refrain ‘Am I navigating correctly?’ as an innocent question loaded with defiant barb. [Read more…]

Bryan Walpert

Two Lagoons by Trevor Hayes (Seraph Press, 2017), 20 pp., $20; Floods Another Chamber by James Brown (Victoria University Press, 2017), 112 pp., $25; Symphony for Human Transport by Lisa Samuels (Shearsman Books, 2017), 75 pp., $17

Trevor Hayes is a Punakaiki poet, but his chapbook is founded often on the landscapes of South America, where he has lived, travelled and taught. It opens appropriately with ‘Cartography’, orienting us with a sense of place and speaker—someone reading a map at a cafe mid-journey, even if that speaker is in the second person, the lyric ‘I’ snuck in as a quotation in italics: ‘It’s a relief to be able to say / I am here—as you look out / on the contour lines …’ The sense of journey continues in many of these beautiful, carefully rendered poems, e.g. ‘Going Nowhere’, ‘Peruvian Light’, ‘Cabo de Gata, Almería’. These are uncertain landscapes in which the speaker feels marginal, such as ‘empty museums / and vacant parking lots’, and it is clear such landscapes are both physical and emotional.  [Read more…]

Mary Cresswell 

Aspiring Daybook: The diary of Elsie Winslow by Annabel Wilson (Submarine/Mākaro, 2018) 128 pp., $25; Are Friends Electric? by Helen Heath (Victoria University Press, 2018), 90 pp., $25; Winter Eyes by Harry Ricketts (Victoria University Press, 2018), 80 pp., $25; Work & Play by Owen Bullock (Canberra: Recent Work Press, 2017), 76 pp., AUD$12.95; Semi by Owen Bullock (Glebe: Puncher and Wattmann), 124 pp., AUD$25

Annabel Wilson’s Aspiring Daybook is a very good read. The narrative is a year in the life of (fictional) Elsie Winslow, brought back from Europe to Wānaka to take care of her dying brother. Wilson uses poems, emails, photos and one-liners to record this year: it plays out in the turn of the seasons in surrounding mountains and lakes as well as in human lives, not just of her brother but also of a glaciologist who ‘had no time to get his ice axe in when he slipped’ (p122). The book’s excellent layout helps move the plot along, using a variety of formats to reflect different topics as they develop. [Read more…]

Michael Steven

The Facts by Therese Lloyd (Victoria University Press, 2018), $25; Punctuation by Rogelio Guedea, with translations by Roger Hickin (Cold Hub Press, 2017), 48 pp., $25

If you favour a kind of poetry that behaves itself, that plays it safe by treating difficult subjects with kid gloves and always opts for easy resolution, The Facts is not the book for you. It is brutal, disquieting, and in parts downright heartbreaking. It is also unflinchingly honest, intelligent, wise and beautiful. Therese Lloyd’s second full-length collection is the creative component of her doctoral submission, a dissertation on ekphrastic practices in the work of Canadian poet and classicist Anne Carson.  [Read more…]

Murray Edmond

American Retrospective: Poems 1961–2016 by Eleanor Rimoldi (Hicksville Press, 2018), 56 pp., $25; Foreign Native by Lisa Samuels (Black Radish Books, 2018) 60 pp.

The poems in Eleanor Rimoldi’s American Retrospective do not put poetry qua poetry at stake. Instead the ‘lived life’ from which these poems have emerged is positioned downstage centre. There are poems as ‘witness’ and poems as markers, signs along the way. The front cover of the book is a photo of Rimoldi from what I imagine is 1961 – and the back cover presumably a photo from 2017. The sepia tones and visible folds of the front cover give way to the undamaged full colour at the end. [Read more…]