Landfall

Vincent O’Sullivan

What Fire by Alice Miller (Liverpool University Press, 2021), 52pp, $37; Unseasoned Campaigner by Janet Newman (Otago University Press, 2021), 104pp, $27.50

What fire, indeed? This attractively printed collection with its fifty pages of poetry is prefaced with a quote from Volumnia, the honour-at-all-cost matron in Coriolanus: 

I am hush’d until our city be a-fire,
And then I’ll speak a little.

There is also a poem called ‘Volumnia’, with its lines: 

We had no use for history but Volumnia’s.
That woman against fire.

[Read more…]

Erik Kennedy

A Riderless Horse by Tim Upperton (Auckland University Press, 2022), 68pp, $24.99; Naming the Beasts by Elizabeth Morton (Otago University Press, 2022), 80pp, $25; Surrender by Michaela Keeble (Taraheke | BushLawyer, 2022), 130pp, $30

My only complaint about Tim Upperton’s work is that there is not enough of it. A Riderless Horse comes a full eight years after his last book, The Night We Ate the Baby, and, like that book and his first (A House on Fire in 2009), it has barely fifty pages of poems in it. But Upperton builds books like racing cars, without an unnecessary gram. In only thirty-two poems, we get full servings of hard-won wisdom and music and rue and pathos. In a recent interview, Upperton characterised A Riderless Horse as ‘a kinder, more reflective book’. Some of the strongest poems in the book seem to be evidence that this is true. [Read more…]