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Poems comfortable to read

27/3/2025

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Clay Eaters 
by Gregory Kan


Clay Eaters covers a lot of spaces and time: being at home both now and then, military service, life with a cat, New Zealand, Singapore just for starters. The travels in time and space are all covered with equal equanimity, matter-of-fact relaxed language that requires no uncomfortable decision on the part of the reader about whether or not to keep going.
     The poems are comfortable to read, so much so that you don’t realise how much information and what a range of casual comment you are absorbing – whether it’s about Uncle Chee Boon, Gilgamesh, Kan’s birth family, Madam Dai, T, Gregory Kan himself or the full cast. The action moves back and forth, from the barren red clay patches of Singapore to the ‘things in the trees’ lying in wait in all sorts of islands.
                   Home one day

                         Sitting on the steps
                   ​      Familiar, unfamiliar
                         The steps wider than I remembered
                         And the things in each room, further apart
                         I had a shower
                   ​      And became several outlines of myself
                         I just wanted to stay still
                         For a long time    (p 89)
    One reason the collection reads so well is its design and layout, always just as much part of a book as its words, but especially noticeable in this book. There are a couple of pages of three-columned lists: these remind us that any work is composed of discrete blobs of information (atoms, if you want to be fussy). But most entries are single pages, apparently randomly presented either as a poetry-shaped item (left justified, double-spaced, each line punctuated only with an initial cap) or a prose-shaped item (centred, fully justified, 1.5 spaced, some end punctuation). Some items conspicuously include a few italics or full caps. (Both the items quoted in this review are set in the poetry-shaped style.)
    There are no titles to push us into a corner, and the language is descriptive and non-confrontational; the only direct address is in the dozen items specifically addressing the cat. Other than hints from the layout, there’s no nagging at the reader to think ‘prose’ or ‘poetry’ – the individual items drift along en masse, each equally important.

                         ​I think part of me felt at home there
                         I think part of my unease
                         Was that I felt at home there
                         Like I could be just another ghost there
                         Floating among the branches    (p 81)
    The overall feeling is that time is having a play with us – and this feels total, casual and appropriate. Time can do that to you, even though we don’t always notice; this collection of poems gives us the luxury of a huge variety of incidents and places combined with an overall feeling of no rush, no hassle, no sweat – just sit back and remember.

Review by Mary Cresswell
Title: Clay Eaters
Author: Gregory Kan
Publisher: Auckland University Press
ISBN: 9781776711536
RRP: $29.99
Available: bookshops
​
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Novel tale of NZ’s first beekeeper

20/3/2025

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Miss Bumby’s Mission 
by J M Laird


A steep learning curve for Mary Bumby, beekeeper and missionary wife.
    It is 1838 and, in Birmingham, 27-year-old Mary Bumby is both beekeeper and housekeeper to her Wesleyan (Methodist) minister brother, John Bumby. When John announces his intention to apply to do missionary work in New Zealand, Mary volunteers to go with him. She will take two hives of honeybees. 
    John’s religious conviction allows him to disregard any suggestions of the dangers and hardships that they may face: “the Lord’s work is his life”. He has heard that New Zealand is a land “beset with whalers, sealers and merchantmen” and it is his duty to go there and introduce the ‘natives’ to the Lord.
    Mary shares her brother’s faith but she wonders about the voyage, rumours of cannibalism, exaggerated surely, and where will they get their tea? Will it come directly from China? Or from India where tea is just beginning to be cultivated. What flowers will the bees find in New Zealand, and will there be badgers there to overturn and rob the hives? So many questions and worries and no-one to answer and reassure her. It’s less than 70 years since James Cook returned from his first voyage to the Pacific. The European population of New Zealand is around 1,000 and the country is not yet an official colony.
    And so Mary Bumby and her bees, safely sealed in their skep hives (a sort of upturned woven basket) are plunged into an almost unknown world. The miseries of the voyage give way to settling at the Wesleyan Mangungu mission station, near Horeke on the upper reaches of the Hokianga Harbour.
    In Miss Bumby’s Mission, Laird tells the story of the following years in Mary’s own words, based on Mary’s letters and diaries. A deceptively simple voice describes everyday life among the missionaries as well as some truly momentous events such as the second major signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in front of the mission house with 70 rangatira and Governor Hobson surrounded by a crowd of around 3,000. The Bumbys entertain Colonel William Wakefield and his nephew Jerningham on their first voyage to seek a site for a new colony. John and Mary both learn te reo Māori and John thrives in his missionary work. They are surprised to learn that the place they thought of as ‘Man-gun-gu’ is actually pronounced ‘Mah-nu-nu’. Mary delights in the local flora and the bees thrive: she is remembered as New Zealand’s first beekeeper and her honey is appreciated by the entire community while her beeswax candles burn pleasantly in church.
    Laird has struck just the right balance here of missionary zeal, everyday pioneer life, historic events and of course the techniques of bee keeping. Friction among the missionaries adds a threat of danger while tragedy and a surprise romance round out Mary Bumby’s story.
    Regardless of what our thoughts on the role of missionaries may be, Miss Bumby’s Mission is an informative and thought provoking read, set in a very isolated part of the Far North during a key period in our country’s history. I was interested to learn that the Mangungu Mission House still stands under the protection of Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga.

Review by Carolyn McKenzie
Title: Miss Bumby’s Mission 
Author: J M Laird
Publisher: Northern Bee Books
ISBN: 978-1-914934-91-9
RRP: $35.00
Available: bookshops
​
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Immediacy of pain expressed in poetry

13/3/2025

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over under fed
by Amy Marguerite

 
Amy Marguerite’s collection 'over under fed' doesn’t lack for words and doesn’t lack for excitement, but reading it leaves me thinking that all the words have been collected together at the bottom of a slide, each of them landing at random in a heap. We enter it at our own risk and from whatever angle we just happen to be standing at at the moment. All I can take away from it is a sense that all of the words were written to express the immediacy of pain and that nothing else matters, even how the pain is expressed.
    The individual poems all seem to come to similar degrees of anguish. In particular, a six-poem series of discharge notes seems to describe past pain over relationships (and names names), focusing on how everything still hurts.  discharge notes (ii) reads:

                     a few years ago i decided i’d write
                     a list of all the women i owe my life to
                     even the women who have hurt me 
                     a lot like claudia. it was overwhelming
                     not to write to carry so i deleted the
                     phone note wrote a letter to claudia
                     instead. gratefulness is so sore you can’t
                     ever expect anyone to feel how they made you
                     feel especially if they’ve never almost
                     been dead. jean didn’t recognise my sister
                     at the shop said you must have gone
                     ​to school with amy but she looks so much
                     like me even i see it now the way i
                     still have a problem with things that just
                     keep mattering like buying normal coke.
 
                     jean’s gone home now anorexia went
                     when I buried the tube in the ground
                     doing well and gemma died that day  (p 24)
 
    The blurb describes, ‘a hunger for a charged, combustible life of dreams and elation’, and this poem (quoted complete) is to me a fair example of this hunger in action, stream of consciousness in several streams, all coming together in a switch to a different topic.
     Words are our way of nailing down facts, and words are our way of expressing what is beyond words. I’d argue these as descriptions of prose and of poetry (and all the stages in between) – but I can’t fit these poems in. I feel that they need more shape. And I know perfectly well that this may be their strength, even though this reader feels left with an excess of raw material and the regret that there isn’t more structure to contain it.

Review by Mary Cresswell
Title: over under fed
Author: Amy Marguerite
Publisher: Auckland University Press
ISBN: 9781776711642
RRP: $24.99
Available: bookshops
​
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