Poetry Books
STAR TRAILS
by Alexandra Fraser (Steele Roberts, $25)
Her father’s photography provides inspiration for award-winning author Fraser in this heartfelt second collection. Images hold metaphor and meaning as the poet explores her ancestry, the Waikato environs of her youth, the shifting landscape of memory and the significance of science and scientists to our existence. The consequence is more public than personal as interlacing poems assemble a narrative of how inquiry, creativity and dissent are necessary to a fulfilled life. Who are we, where have we come from and what might we yet become: this moving collection confronts these and many other important questions. (SH)
BY SEA MOUTHS SPEAKING
by Denys Trussell (Brick Row, $75)
This handsome hardback volume provides a thorough collection of Trussell’s poems and prose. A long-time environmentalist and award-winning writer, Trussell’s work is acutely attuned to the New Zealand landscape and its shifting ecological impacts. The work gathered here spans 45 years and showcases important pieces such as sections from the 1999 Montana Book award shortlisted Walking into the Millennium, the epic Archipelago: The Ocean Soliloquies and melodic early offerings like Words for the Rock Antipodes. A weighty tome deserving of one of Aotearoa’s finest bucolic, eco-activist authors. (SH)
HOW TO LIVE
by Helen Rickerby
(Auckland University Press, $25)
Often erased, invisible or silenced, influential women in history are voice, identity, exploration and muse in Rickerby’s new collection. A poetic her-story ensues. The opening Notes on the unsilent woman ,a 58-part ode to ancient Greek philosopher, Hipparchia of Maroneia, is sister to the epic-ending titular poem, a chorus involving Susan Sontag, Simone Weil and others. In-between, George Eliot, Mary Shelley and first known female Chinese historian Ban Zhao speak. Far from exclusively muliebral though, How to Live also converses with Stravinsky, Lacan and Heidegger. Here is a book at turns, deeply philosophical, finetuned and creatively formed. (SH)
TO THE OCCUPANT
by Emma Neale (Otago University Press, $28)
“A body, such a ponderous thing/ to drag along a life in/ this coffin-fat cabinet/ the mind-candle”: so begins Neale’s strong sixth collection. Body and mind, their experiences and imaginings, their limits and expanses sit at the heart of the poems which follow, structured as they are into three sections: the imaginative A Room that Holds the Sea, the nature-infused So Sang a Little Clod of Clay and the poetic, epistolary Selected Letters. Top offerings, like Dark Glass and Turn, illustrate how Neale’s lyricism, strong storytelling and perceptive slant on human nature is everywhere evident in this superb book. (SH)
A PLACE TO RETURN TO
by John Allison (Cold Hub Press, $30)
Allison’s fifth collection offers a set of new and unpublished poems powerful in their perception, insight and imagination. For instance, he begins an early poem, Native Country with, “I have slipped back …”, the kind of short but potent line that speaks to the wider thematic fusion of impetus and retreat present in many works here. Throughout, the author mines memories, past sanctuaries and new experiences, accentuating all with his well-crafted call to landscape, seasons and weather as symbols of mood, image and metaphor. (SH)
MOTH HOUR
by Anne Kennedy
(Auckland University Press, $25)
Anne Kennedy’s brother, Phillip, died on Guy Fawkes night, 1973, when he was partying on a hill-slope section in Wellington and accidentally fell to his death. He was only 22. Moth Hour contains two poem sequences flanked by a Foreword and an Afterword, that tell Phillip’s story. The skilled use of structure holds poems of elegiac power. Kennedy’s prose Introduction explains the facts simply. She was 14 when Phillip died. “The noisy house went silent. I lay on the red rug in the living room and listened to Beethoven’s Thirty-three Variations on a Waltz by Anton Diabelli, Op. 120 — over and over, because it was there.” It is a book that will be re-read. (DH)
RANSACK
by essa may ranapiri (Victoria University Press, $25) Language enshrines the duality of gender and fails those who live outside binary constraints. Enter essa may ranapiri’s exciting first collection, a suite of poems engaging with what it means in word and being to be takatapui (tangata whenua with diverse gender identities). ransack weaves epistolary poems written to Orlando (Virginia Wolf’s gender-bending protagonist) with verses examining pronoun use, memory shards and revivifications of Maori mythical tales. The result is beautiful, individual and fresh. (SH)