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Trying to Read Standing Up

July 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

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…]

Liminal States

May 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

Iona Winter

Kurangaituku by Whiti Hereaka (Huia, 2021), 350pp, $35

Whiti Hereaka (Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Te Arawa, Tūhourangi, Ngāti Whakaue, Ngāti Tumatawera, Tainui, Pākehā) holds an MA in Creative Writing from the IIML. A screenwriter, novelist, playwright, barrister and solicitor, she has been shortlisted and won awards for both her scriptwriting and her three novels: The Graphologist’s Apprentice (2010), Bugs (2013) and Legacy (2018). And now we have Kurangaituku, shortlisted for the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction in 2022. E hika, this wahine is consistent! In addition, I think it’s fair to say (and widely publicised) that Hereaka is also a whizz at creating captivating bird-woman attire for book launches. [Read more…]

Bowled Basilisk, Caught Agdistis

May 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

Robert McLean

tumble by Joanna Preston (Otago University Press, 2021), 85pp, $27.50; Reading the Signs by Janis Freegard (The Cuba Press, 2020), 96pp, $25; Slips: Cricket poems by Mark Pirie (Headworx, 2021), 145pp, $30.

‘Female, nude’, the opening poem of Joanna Preston’s sophomore collection tumble, makes itself known with steely assuredness:

The things we prize. Innocence,
the sleeping fire that speaks

through the long white flower
of her spine, the curve

of her hips the rim of a slow
turning wheel

on which to break a man. [Read more…]

Maternal Alchemy: The (surprisingly) beautiful entropy of motherhood

November 1, 2020 Leave a Comment

Emma Gattey

When We Remember to Breathe: Mess, magic and mothering by Michele Powles and Renee Liang (Magpie Pulp, 2019), 211pp, $25

This is a love-addled, baby-brained, hormone soup of a book. And I could not be using those compounds in a more positive way. Billed as ‘a conversation by Michele Powles and Renee Liang’, this textual, maternal exchange between two gifted authors is one of radical honesty and vulnerability. Composed of emails exchanged during their second pregnancies (and beyond), this conversation feels easy, fluid and mutually beneficial. They thrilled and enthralled one another with the entropy of motherhood. To new parents, but mothers especially, there must be something deeply cathartic to this. Even for childless readers (myself included), there’s something reassuring about this creative kinship and solidarity through maternity. [Read more…]