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…]

Siobhan Harvey

Whisper of a Crow’s Wing by Majella Cullinane (Otago University Press, 2018), 80 pp., $27.50; Threading Between by Dorothy Howie (Steele Roberts, 2017), 61 pp., $20; Pasture and Flock: New and selected poems by Anna Jackson (Auckland University Press, 2018), 140 pp., $35

‘You can find poetry in your everyday life,’ writes Carol Ann Duffy, ‘your memory, in what people say on the bus, in the news … or just what’s in your heart.’¹ 

For too long, what was conceived as ‘the everyday’ (e.g. the domestic and personal) was socially sanctioned as the preserve of women writers. To them were left the perceived crumbs of literature – the domesticated spaces, internal lives and constraints of social mores; those subjects permitted in fiction, for instance. Poetry, meanwhile, focused upon the important stuff: public discourse, big ideas, history, philosophy. In the process, female writers, their voices and concerns were marginalised. In the 1960s, Second Wave Feminist Criticism solidified the consciousness- raising of its First Wave predecessor and began to readdress the gender sidelining that had disregarded important female poetic voices like Felicia Hemans and Letitia Elizabeth Landon. [Read more…]

Diane Brown

Body, Remember by Wes Lee (Lorgnette Series, Eyewear Publishing, 2017) 34 pp., $23.32; Anchor Stone by Tony Beyer (Cold Hub Press, 2017) 165 pp., $39.99; The Trials of Minnie Dean: A verse biography by Karen Zelas (Submarine, Mākaro Press, 2017), 210 pp., $25

In Body Remember (a pamphlet of 20 poems), Wellington-based poet and short story writer Wes Lee explores the body: what it knows but does not speak of, what it draws a veil over, what it chooses to forget. In the opening poem, ‘Body, did you know’, the body is interrogated as if witness to a crime: ‘Lung were you aware, heart did you witness, throat were you looking through the screen door …’ It’s as if the body is complicit and has failed to protect itself from abuse. Neither the abuse nor the abuser are named. In ‘The players are dead’ it becomes a little more obvious. The perp (perpetrator?) is dead but he comes back at night to the adult persona, who tells herself, ‘the players are dead, / how dead they are, / doorknob dead, /dead / dead / dead / as a doornail’. Someone is listening through the wall, hearing sounds of a struggle. Doing nothing. That someone is now dead too. But the speaker in the poem cannot form a word when the perpetrator returns. She blames the body for playing dead, for not crying out. Now adult, it doesn’t take much to set her screaming. Some lines remind me of Sylvia Plath: ‘If you were an Action Man I would have bent your legs; stared at your raised scar just beneath your plastic cheek. I would have put you back in your box.’ In comparison to Plath, Lee’s lines are less histrionic, less accusatory, and thus have the effect of drawing the reader into the world of the child whose body has betrayed her.  [Read more…]

Ben Brown

Rāwāhi by Briar Wood (Anahera Press, 2017), 70 pp., $25; Ternion by Vaughan Rapatahana (erbacce-press, 2017) 98 pp., $17.50; My Wide White Bed by Trish Harris (Landing Press, 2017), 76 pp., $22

Imagine yourself the kaiwhakahaere o te waka.

You are the navigator and here lies an ocean defined by its vastness, its myriad pathways, its unfathomed depths. You are drawn by the promise of legend, the guidance of stars and planets, the variant winds, the cloud shapes and currents, the travel of birds and the movement of fishes, of air breathing dolphins as tohu and kaitiaki, of symbol and guardian, wherein you will discover new and ancient islands, there to begin and end, to fulfill and toil and plunder and continuously wonder why.

Briar Wood and Rāwāhi invite you to navigate these pathways, discover pearls and long-forgotten wisdoms. The root of the word is wāhi, firm in its meaning: place. Rāwāhi is a place over yonder, a place not here, overseas, far away yet somehow present, immediate, even familiar. [Read more…]

Lynley Edmeades 

Vanishing Points by Michele Leggott (Auckland University Press, 2017), 132 pp., $27.99; Flow by Airini Beautrais (Victoria University Press, 2017), 181 pp., $30; Tightrope by Selina Tusitala Marsh (Auckland University Press, 2017), 112 pp., $27.99

Michele Leggott’s latest offering is a hybridised feast. It is equal parts poetry, essay and memoir, put together with the light touch of a poet at ease with her craft. Vanishing Points ruminates on themes big and small, from obscure astral constellations to a child’s drawing; from the flimsiness of memory to gradual loss of sight. It is kaleidoscopic, and as sonant as it is glittering.  [Read more…]