Jordan Hamel

Ghosts by Siobhan Harvey (Otago University Press, 2021), 112pp., $27.50; Five O’Clock Shadows by Richard Langston (Cuba Press, 2020), 48pp., $25; Fancy Dancing: New and selected poems 2004–2020 by Bernadette Hall (Victoria University Press, 2020), 128pp., $30

The one we’re forced to repeat: here is the story

They create and rewrite

into poems such as this

The prologue ‘Night, a Place of Regeneration’ builds the architecture for Siobhan Harvey’s latest collection, Ghosts. The writing and rewriting of the same story, the story of movement, of migration, of memory, of home, of the individual and communal, all of which become ghosts that constantly regenerate through the book.

So much of this collection unpacks what it means to haunt and be haunted, what experiences and trauma we give voice and a soul to, what our history owes us, and how that history sits within a life that is not just ours.  [Read more…]

Siobhan Harvey 

The Savage Coloniser Book by Tusiata Avia (Victoria University Press, 2021), 96pp, $25; Magnolia 木蘭 by Nina Mingya Powles (Seraph Press, 2021), 82pp, $30

Now that the glitz, commotion and hype of the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards are over for another year, readers are left to the books themselves. By now we know those that made the longlist, those that made the shortlist and, undoubtedly meritorious also, those that didn’t. In this last category one might whisper—or, post-literary appraisal, can one say roar?—authors and titles such as Kay McKenzie Cooke’s uplifting third collection Upturned (The Cuba Press), Rata Gordon’s Second Person (Victoria University Press) and Oscar Upperton’s tremendous New Transgender Blockbusters (Victoria University Press). This, of course, is the nature of any prize-giving beast—subjectivity. It is also the nature of the review and the reviewer. The celebrations and commiserations roundly completed, it falls to me to bring my subjectivity to two books that made the illustrious shortlist category in the aforementioned awards: The Savage Coloniser Book by Tusiata Avia and Nina Mingya Powles’ much heralded (both nationally and internationally) Magnolia 木蘭.  [Read more…]

Erik Kennedy

National Anthem by Mohamed Hassan (Dead Bird Books, 2020), 68pp., $35; Childwood by Denis Welch (Steele Roberts, 2019), 64pp., $20; The Sets by Victor Billot (Otago University Press, 2021), 118pp., $27.50

The ‘national anthem’ of Mohamed Hassan’s second book of poems, National Anthem, is built on a clever contradiction: it is not actually meant to be a national anthem at all, as it is sceptical of the very idea of nation states. As the title poem puts it:

I pledge myself to

no flag

no border

no house of trees

no fairy tale past

no charismatic king

no industry of false profits

burying their dead in the sand [Read more…]

Harry Ricketts

Nouns, Verbs, Etc: Selected poems by Fiona Farrell (Otago University Press, 2020), 211pp, $35

Fiona Farrell is one of those enviable writers equally adept at fiction, non-fiction and poetry, not to mention plays. She is perhaps best known for The Skinny Louie Book and, more recently, for The Quake Year and The Villa at the Edge of the Empire: One hundred ways to read a city, but her three intermittent poetry collections have also been eagerly awaited and read.

Selections from these three volumes—Cutting Out (1987), The Inhabited Initial (1999) and The Pop-Up Book of Invasions (2007)—plus poems from the essay collection The Broken Book (2011) are represented here in chronological order. Interspersed between these is a generous helping of uncollected poems, not arranged chronologically but, as Farrell says in her Preface, ‘loosely as they seemed to echo one another or share a common theme’. The result disrupts any attempt at an overly chronological or ‘developmental’ reading of the work. The poems are bracketed by the evocative Preface and by a series of fascinating Notes (some of which have already appeared with the separate volumes). It is an impressive ensemble: engaging, inventive, sometimes playful, always compelling. [Read more…]