This review was first published in the print edition of Landfall 241

Siobhan Harvey

No Traveller Returns by Ruth France (Cold Hub Press, 2020), 104pp, $27.50; Wanting to Tell You Everything by Elizabeth Brooke-Carr (Caselberg Press, 2020), 66pp, $25; The Needles of the Marram Grass by W.S. Broughton (SwampThing, 2019), 130pp, $25

The ease with which we forget or cast aside writers after their deaths, particularly those identifying as women, non-Pākehā and non-hetero-normative, is a problem with a long history. For centuries, authors around the world and their bodies of work have been lost to subsequent generations.

No Traveller Returns by Ruth France, Wanting to Tell You Everything by Elizabeth Brooke-Carr and The Needles of the Marram Grass by W.S. Broughton are three posthumously published New Zealand collections. The poetry within their covers illustrates the way that powerful work endures beyond an author’s passing. These books are potential prompts to us to rethink how we save and savour contemporary literature so that future generations have access to it. [Read more…]

Genevieve Scanlan

the moment, taken by Jennifer Compton (Recent Work Press, 2021), 72pp, AUD$19.95; Sleeping with Stones by Serie Barford (Anahera Press, 2021), 77pp, $25; Rejoice Instead: The collected poems of Peter Hooper edited by Pat White (Cold Hub Press, 2021), 224pp, $42.50

the moment, taken is Jennifer Compton’s eleventh collection of poetry. The back cover tells us these are poems drawn from eidetic memory—that is, ‘relating to or denoting mental images having unusual vividness and detail, as if actually visible’. The titular poem is a fine example of this, providing both the vivid detail and the surreal quality of an individual childhood memory: ‘then that once, i was waylaid / by a green lure / a staircase / up into a wilderness […] (when i got to school / i told a lie / with eyes averted)’. [Read more…]