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…]