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Subtle but important message in picture book

27/3/2023

Mama’s Chickens
by Michelle Worthington
& Nicky Johnston

On the surface it’s a sweet little story, but it has serious intent. The dedication at the front gives the clue –
For all the mamas who feel broken but are glued together with love.
What happens when the primary carer needs care herself? Through the simple and straightforward text by Michelle Worthington, children are subtly prompted to relate with understanding.
Anyone who has kept hens will recognize the realistic chooky postures in Nicky Johnston’s pictures. There are other good touches here too that children will like – a boy hanging on a revolving clothesline trying to get momentum to ride around.
There’s more to the illustrations than this though – they are more than just pictures to entertain and amuse little ones. See how the children and the hens are paired within them and you’ll appreciate how they are cleverly designed so the hens represent the children – Mama’s human chicks.
The actual situation of a mother suffering from developing dementia will be fully relevant to only a few households with young children, but the wider message of family relationships underpinned by acceptance and love should be universal.

Review by Emily R

Title: Mama’s Chickens
Author: Michelle Worthington; illustrator Nicky Johnston
Publisher: EK books
ISBN: 9781922539458
RRP: $24.99
Available: bookshops

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Stories offer something for everyone

18/3/2023

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Transit Lounge: Stories
by JCL Purchase

This collection of nineteen short stories in 260 pages and almost 113,000 words offers something for everyone in the process of demonstrating the interconnectedness of people in a very small society. It does this through an ambitious and largely successful decision to have characters appear and reappear at different stages of their journey.
It needs to be said at the outset that Purchase is an absolute master of description; settings and backgrounds are laid out so that the reader can feel the wind, hear the birds, or get out of the way as hard-driven cars crunch across the gravel. This is not one-dimensional, for she is equally adept at describing people— a terminally-ill drug addict is described as vividly as his girlfriend’s  ‘crooked smile’, while the account of Frank’s living arrangements in Maungaturoto evoke more than a slight wince. The author’s superb eye for character is supported by deep analysis of their psyche, and the result is a cast of players that are entirely credible for by far the most part.
  As befits such a widely-drawn cast, the story settings are themselves eclectic, but most of them concern, in some way, the twin polarities of truth and falsehood. The opening story, for example, is that of an Elvis impersonator who is very good at what he does. However, it is impossible to miss the essential falsity of his life, all the way from the fact that his living is earned from imitation to the fact that part of his stage presence is a large, false penis. And he never quite solves the questions raised by his mother’s assertion that the real Elvis was his father.
  Similarly, the verbosity of the narrator in ‘Apple of My Eye’ evokes the Shakespearean comment, “Methinks the man doth protest too much” and one wonders quite what aspect of her relationship with young Bobby is hidden within her lavish paean of praise for him.
  Other stories owing much to falsehood include the addict mentioned above; a mother living her life through her errant daughter; a policeman owning every prejudice in the book who determines to eschew personal weakness, to focus on his job, to show leadership, to put his personal problems ‘on the back burner’—so that he can get back to Auckland by the weekend when the All Blacks are playing a test. Other stories in the same vein include the teacher who, in tennis terms, rather walks around her backhand in talking herself out of enforcing classroom standards upon closed-minded students who are something more than mildly bolshie, because she is tired, spent and seeking a quiet life.
  While reality cuts in through the story of a capitalist who uses poor people’s labour to enrich himself and an ‘illegal’ nurse who tolerates sexual abuse for the sake of keeping a job, it’s not all negative. There is grim humour in the story of the difference in radicalism between ‘Think Big’ New Zealand and the Third Reich, and the power of love between two siblings, the products of shocking childhood neglect and abuse. Also showing the power of love is ‘Golden Girl’ in which a neglected teenager proves to an aptly-named Lazarus that his existence did not die with his wife, and that he still has a good and useful purpose.
  The author’s use of register is also outstanding, and the stories ‘Queen of the Night’ and ‘Under the Pohutukawa Tree’ indicate mastery of her ability to convey dignity and verisimilitude through tone.
  Are there drawbacks? Not many. Only the story ‘Lucked Out’ disappoints, with its dialogue so redolent of characters in a cowboy movie, and a most unlikely fight scene in the cockpit of a helicopter in flight, for not even ‘Muhammad Ali in his prime could have managed a right uppercut while flying left seat, as one does in aircraft.
  But these are small things, and detract not at all from the quality of JCL Purchase’s searching examinations of the vagaries of the human spirit and the relationships to which they lead. From the stories of others to the autobiographical ‘The Journey’, this is a well-constructed work which will cause the reader to re-visit it as one compelling thought after another kicks in.

Review by MJ Burr

Title: Transit Lounge: Stories
Author: JCL Purchase
Publisher: Lasavia Publishing
ISBN: 978-1-9911605-4-6
RRP: $29.99
Available: bookshops; booksellers, or from the publisher 09-372 6500, [email protected]

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Splendid collection of images

9/3/2023

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Say I Do This: Poems 2018-2022
by C. K. Stead

This book is a splendid collection of images of death and dying – not the activity itself (no midwinter earthquakes, no incontinence, no nasty surprises) but an acceptance of death as a fact of life. How much the author believes that is his own business; he has given us a variety of shapes and sizes from which to enjoy drawing our own conclusions.
The collection is in three sections: Home, Away, and ...and Friends. The author roams happily in these territories using haiku, tercets, whatever verse style fits the thought of the day, all of them elegantly done. ‘Poem in October (with shades of Dylan Thomas)’ ends the Home section. The first of its six verses makes it pretty clear what’s going on:
It was my ninetieth year to heaven
   woke to my hearing from Hobson Bay neighbourhood
   signals of early fruit on grapevine and plum tree
   and down on the mud-flat our migrant seabirds returning
   while in nearby gardens blackbird and thrush were harassed
   from nests in carport and hedge by their thankless offspring,
   my morning walk
   to take me abroad in a shower of all my days –
   Becoming, Being, and then Fading
   thirty years each, but the Becoming had been slow
   (‘Don’t peak too early’) and overlapped with Being
   as Being slid into the Fade. (pp.31-32)

Away immediately explodes into the wider world: Russell Square, Menton, Afghanistan, religion, Judas, national anthems, the death of Orpheus, flirtations and observations, Cavafy, Simón Bolívar.  The section’s opening poem –  ‘What Next?’ – ends with:
   and time to say my goodbyes to Hammersmith ...
   It could have been a moment of real regret

   and tearful verse – but it brought me to this page
   to say ‘OK that’s done, so what comes next?’ –

   never mind you know quite well there is no Next,
   that next is Nothing. Lean into it, as into a wind.    (p. 35)

... and Friends covers even more territory. Names noted in first grab: Kay, John Berryman, Gerald Murnane, Ian, Roger and Wystan, Keri Hulme, Kevin Ireland, the list goes on. This one is ‘For Fleur Adcock’ (p. 62, quoted in full):
      You teach us how many poems are hiding
   in a small precinct, in the short circuit
   of a garden close to a wood –
   how many small animals, insects and birds
   with their quirks, their colours and behaviours –
   never mind memory that other octogenarian
   storehouse and stumbling-block
   for the sensibility that lives at the last by language
   and the gifts of friendship
   may die alone leaving the front door open.

And at the end of the day? Gathered on the pier, we are watching a stately swan boat start its trip across the Hauraki Gulf, past the yellow buoy and into the unknown – we may hope to witness a return trip, but this is not for us to plan. In the meantime we are left standing by a warehouse of metaphor, all of it a joy to have on hand in a world where people may run out of oxygen but never of words.

Review by Mary Cresswell

Title: Say I Do This: Poems 2018-2022
Author: C. K. Stead
Publisher: Auckland University Press
ISBN: 9781776710997
RRP: $35
Available: bookshops

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Subtle but important message in picture book

Stories offer something for everyone

Splendid collection of images

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