Alan Roddick
House & Contents by Gregory O’Brien (Auckland University Press, 2022), 112pp, $29.99; Museum by Frances Samuel (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2022), 88pp, $25; Farce by Murray Edmond (Compound Press, 2022), 98pp, $25
Gregory O’Brien’s latest book is a real treat, with its three dozen poems accompanied by twenty-three of his paintings in full colour: O’Brien the curator, putting on his own show. The paintings are not ‘illustrations’ but talk with the poems as if on equal terms, as some of their titles demonstrate: ‘Ode to a water molecule and five Canterbury rivers’, for example, or the Wordsworthian ‘Lines composed a few metres above high water, Meretoto’. ‘The uses of fondness’ is an exception, being a poem in a painting, or a painting of a poem. [Read more…]