Vaughan Rapatahana

The Little Sublime Comedy by John Gallas (Carcanet Press, 2017), 184 pp., £11.69/$22.29; Coming to It by Sam Hunt (Potton & Burton, 2018), 208 pp., $29.99; That Derrida Whom I Derided Died by C.K. Stead (Auckland University Press, 2018), 128 pp., $29.99

Three collections of poetry, all distinctly different. Indeed, the only commonality I discern is that the poets are all older Pākehā men, even given that I have had some dealings with all three over my own reasonably lengthy lifetime.

Let’s look at the collections separately, starting with the youngest poet, John Gallas. The Little Sublime Comedy is sui generis. It parallels Dante’s Divine Comedy in terms of structure, namely a description of the hero’s moral progress through Hell on to Heaven, but here the parallel ends. Gallas sets his very clever and funny spoof/rip-off/pastiche imbroglio in contemporary Aotearoa New Zealand, and the text is chock-full of solidly Kiwi expressions such as ‘buggered if I knew’, and of Kiwi kai such as bulk cheese and ham sandwiches and Minties. [Read more…]

Emer Lyons

This Joyous, Chaotic Place: Garden poems by Heather McPherson (Spiral, 2018), 88 pp., $25; Dear Tombs, Dear Horizon by Anna Jackson (Seraph Press, 2018), 24 pp., $20; Last Stop Before Insomnia/Dernier Arrêt Avant l’Insomnie by Marlène Tissot, translated by Anna Jackson and Geneviève Chevallier (Seraph Press, 2018) 40 pp., £20

Heather McPherson was the first out lesbian published in New Zealand with A Figurehead: A face (Spiral), which appeared in 1982. Her ground-breaking role is something I cherish and consciously bring to my reading of This Joyous, Chaotic Place, McPherson’s posthumously published fifth collection. All the poems here have been carefully edited by Janet Charman, Lynne Ciochetto and Marian Evans, who formed a new Spiral collective to fulfil the request McPherson made before she died, that Charman edit what she called ‘the garden poems’.  [Read more…]

Genevieve Scanlan

A Field Officer’s Notebook by Dan Davin (Cold Hub Press, 2018), 104 pp., $29.95; Murmurations by Art Nahill (Two Hemispheres Poetry, 2018) 68 pp., $27; How to Defeat the Philistines by David Beach (David Beach, 2018), 64 pp., $25; Crisis & Duplication by David Merritt (Compound Press, 2017), 22 pp., $20

‘If I ever get round to making sense of the preceding,’ wrote Dan Davin before his death, ‘I’ll call it Field Officer’s Notebook.’ Editor Robert McLean has honoured this intention, making sense and order of a lifetime’s work in this posthumously published collection. McLean’s introduction provides valuable context, describing the three stages of life in which Davin’s poetry was written: while at university, while serving in World War Two, and during his later years in England. And though the introduction self-consciously admits that some of Davin’s work might now seem dated, the depth of feeling evoked in these poems spans the decades easily.

These are poems heavy with the weight of disillusionment – even those written long before Davin had seen the horrors of war. ‘Perspective’ captures that disenchantment that is keenest-felt when fresh, in adolescence: ‘My father was a hero once. / Now he is a man. / The world shrinks from infinity / To a finger’s span.’ A few pages on comes a lament for wasted talent: ‘In what diversity of sterile tasks / Have I diffused my power, that these full years / Have built no monument of mine.’ If the language and style here are period-specific, the feeling is surely near-universal. [Read more…]