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Work of a really really good poet

30/5/2024

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Hopurangi – Songcatcher: Poems from the Maramataka 
by Robert Sullivan


‘Maramataka’ is the lunar calendar: Robert Sullivan picks it up just before the end of one cycle and follows it on a couple more, writing at least one poem each day.  The poems are attached to a particular night, given an individual title as well as the night’s own name, assigned an energy level, and then printed in order of the calendar. This adds up to a fascinating and wide-ranging conversation between the poet and his world, some of it descriptive, some of it asides and meditations. 
    Sullivan’s earlier Star Waka is impressive for the way he collects/creates a huge variety of separate voices and then puts them together so that they reinforce each other, coming across as a mega-voice. I think he has done something similar here, using poems that add up to being the voice of one completed person in all his individual facets.
    The first poem (p.24) from the calendar series is presented below, with the heading and format in the style common to all the calendar poems. And it is in the tone that all the poems dip into to some degree or another.
                                   Mutuwhenua: Te Awa e Rere Nei
                                                           (((((((Medium Energy)))))))
                                                                       For Dad
 
                            This evening we practised our waiata-ā-ringa with their
                            composer,
                            Waiariki, at Puketeraki Marae. It was healing at Karitāne
      
                            to hear the beautiful words and learn the moves that speak
                            of our places of home, Hikaroroa, Pahatea, Ka Iwi a Weka. It’s
                            okay

                            to make mistakes and smile about them with others
                            who are your relations, and just to carry on carrying the airs

                            and graces of our whānau nui. Kāi Tahu, Kāti Māmoe, Waitaha,
                            Rapuwai, Kāti Huirapa. I’ve eaten shellfish and muttonbirds

                            in the weekend (at Hone Tuwhare’s) and my fill of happiness
                            at Puketeraki. This kai is kōrero, from our whenua too.

    The collection grows from here, a huge variety of topics and styles. At random: ‘The pūrerehu walk under’ (p.36) is a casual observation of butterflies deciding to come in the house.  ‘The last time we saw each other’ (p.87) is a reminiscence dedicated to and shared with American poet Joy Harjo. ‘Kōauau-Te Wāhi Ngaro’ (p.83) gives us some hard-core musicology. ‘Wet-nosed’ (p.43) is one lone haiku. ‘I drove home last night’ (p.70) alerts us as being ‘((Low Energy, so chillax))’. And more...
    Reading through the collection feels like reading through the journal of someone who knows exactly where he’s at and feels easy with it. The voices work together into a complete individual. This is of course because of the content, but also the design. Almost all the poems have a maramataka day label, a title of their own, and an energy level, centred above the text, so turning the pages isn’t the total change of scenery it is in most poetry books. From the beginning, we feel that we are in a carefully designed structure. To me, the typeface also helps glue the text together. I’m of a generation who associates Courier with typewriters – and hence perhaps is a hint that the text is a work in progress, or at the very least, open to change.
    The language is wonderful. I don’t think I’ve ever read a poetry book in which te reo and English mooched along so comfortably together. The words and phrases bubble to the surface in whichever language they happen to be bubbling in – there is no sense of a translation going on in either direction, and thus no need to decide who’s in charge. 
    This may be because Sullivan doesn’t restrict te reo to one major noun per English sentence (as seems to be fashionable). This may be because the thoughts he is expressing aren’t dependent on coming from a particular direction/language and on being identified as such. 
    And it may be because he is a really really good poet who has written a really really good book.

Review by Mary Cresswell
Title: Hopurangi – Songcatcher: Poems from the Maramataka 
Author: Robert Sullivan
Publisher: Auckland University Press
ISBN: 978-1-77671-122-2
RRP: $29.99
Available: bookshops
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Novel based on true story

22/5/2024

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Death of a Countess
by Jenny Harrison


It wasn’t until I reached the end of this book and read the author’s note that I realized this novel is more than a work of fiction. The murder around which the story is crafted was a real case that took place close to 70 years ago and has remained unsolved.
    Jenny Harrison apologizes she was “never able to find enough evidence to write a non-fiction account” of the murder. Top marks to her for the way she has researched the time and the background so fully, and brought it back to public notice, because the background of the real life event is still important. 
    It’s also harrowing.
    Set in 1957, just a dozen years after the end of WW2, the case to be examined by English Detective Andrew Perry involves delving  into details of the inhumanity associated with Auschwitz, Ravensbruck and elsewhere. The subtitle, “Post-war London should have been safe. It wasn’t,” shows the violence and horror didn’t stop there.
    Even though I have read much about the background subject previously, there were new facts to be discovered in the reading of this book.
    Though Death of a Countess is more than just a detective novel or whodunnit because of its depth, those who want to read on that level will also be rewarded.
    Jenny Harrison is an excellent writer and the way she has presented fact, combined with perceptive fiction to produce this well-crafted novel is proof of her skill.

Review by Recenzent
Title: Death of a Countess
Author: Jenny Harrison
Publisher: Lamplighter Press
ISBN: Print edition: 978-0-473-68311-5   E-book edition: 978-0-473-6831-2
RRP: $32
Available: Amazon, Kindle, Piako Stationery Supplies, Te Aroha, or through the author's website www.jennyharrison-author.com
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Kaikōura climax for crime novel

16/5/2024

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​Kaikōura Rendezvous
by Stephen Johnson


This novel is well named because the theme of the book is a rendezvous of many characters. 
    The human characters include Saffron an elderly Oxford professor with a witchlike ability to predict the passage of storms. A major player is Gita, a tropical cyclone relentlessly moving South and destined to smash into the tourist / fishing village of Kaikōura threatening the town and the nefarious plans evolving within it. 
    As time progresses the author provides brief updates on the progression of the numerous characters with their individual but interlocking motivations. This technique controls the format of the book as the reader rapidly moves between plot and sub plot caused by the motivations and diversity of the key players. 
    Within a motor home called Kwozzimoto reporters from Australia searching for a newsworthy story about the impending storm are in the process of uncovering an unexpected series of events with personal implications.
    Meanwhile at sea a damaged Cypriot ship called the 
Hopline was carrying an additional small cargo that wouldn’t be found on any legal inventory. The ship’s master intended dropping this package where a Kaikōura fishing vessel named WOFTAM (Waste Of Fucking Time And Money) owned by a failed commercial fisherman would try to retrieve it and exchange it for a potential payment that would make sense of the remainder of his life. But a tropical cyclone is smashing into the coast with unprecedented ferocity and there’s a group of heavies in town. Others emerge with a more than casual interest in the cargo as well as an investigator, with a history, and a local police force inexperienced, and out of their depth, in dealing with the unfolding events. 
    As the title of the book implies these events converge to a final and fatal rendezvous in Kaikoura where the complexities and the numerous sub plots become resolved, for good or ill, within a crime based underworld few of us would ever experience in real life. Those interested in exploring these clandestine stories where motivations and personalities clash would probably enjoy “Kaikōura Rendezvous”.
    The book is printed in paperback and has been written by an author who clearly knows the area where the novel is set.      

Review by Peter Thomas
Title: Kaikōura Rendezvous
Author: Stephen Johnson
Publisher: Clan Destine Press
ISBN: 9781922904454
RRP: $36.95
Available: Paperback and eBook; Clan Destine Press, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Mighty Ape, The Little Book Shop
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3 new voices with interesting spread

9/5/2024

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AUP New Poets 10
by Tessa Keenan, romesh dissanayake, Sadie Lawrence; Anne Kennedy (ed)


AUP (here aka Anne Kennedy) has again given us three new voices with an interesting and entertaining spread: one tending towards immersion in the present and blame of the past, one with a multifaceted awareness of language and geographical differences, and one of almost physical revulsion towards a world which gives young people no reassuring ideas about what is coming next.
    Tessa Keenan lives in a two-piece world, one in which the past is as significant as the present. She looks from one side to the other – perhaps for patterns? The poem ‘Celesta’ is a universal pattern, an alphabetic poem, which brings us up short at the end with an ending which is not definite at all, forcing us to look to the future. And in ‘Some Other Pā’ we hear: 
            I map myself.
              Even when I’m my stillest, I’m always running between two towns, two maps.
            We are people in motion now. We go towards and away from every home.   (p 19)
    Her poems seem to compare two different stories, both plausible. She tends to speak from one place at a time, but from that perspective, she is looking for alternatives, different levels of meaning, some of them foisted on us by time itself and some of them gratuitously added by ourselves.
    romesh dissanayake, however, is a world traveller both geographically and linguistically. While he easily recognises the chaos this entails, he doesn’t seem to find it disconcerting.  In ‘Natasha says we shouldn’t heat our curries too high in the microwave’ (p 45), he ends:
            we can do what we damn please
                because this is our poem
                about being on holiday
                just try and catch us and
                like free roaming stray dogs
            ​    we’ll duck out stage right
            ​    whenever we like
    But not disconcerting is not the same as understandable. The vase-shaped concrete poem ‘Two gentle strangers’ uses four different writing systems – read the book! (p 34) – to describe the existential impact of not only travelling from A to B but also of arriving, possibly unbroken. The fact that the poet is not thrashing around in misery does not mean that that his worlds are either comprehensible or easy. The geographic spread symbolises the vast cultural differences he is up against.
    Sadie Lawrence speaks from the middle of a group. Her titles, such as ‘All Teenagers are Tapestries’ (quoted below) or ‘Girls Against Minimalism >:-)’, focus on the blood and chaos that comes with being a female and teenaged:
            ​    (girlhood is made of blood
            ​    and it blooms just the same) (it spills
            ​    down your thighs, stems from your nose)
            ​    (sharing like teenage girls        (p 60)
    It’s a very physical world she lives in, full of blood blood blood and all girls together (no ‘young women’ here), and she runs her hands through the physical world as though it were her lovers’ hair. She sometimes leaves aside her revulsion towards her body but not for long. Of the three poets in this collection, Lawrence seems to be most consistent in her views, though the views are all consistent with a horrible scary world – a world seen from an age when the future is totally invisible (but inescapably in front of you, like it or not). She seems to sum it up here, in a very universal ‘heartbreak (living next to the kindergarten)’ (p 70):
            ​    the anger at being perceived as small
            ​    at odds with the knowledge that we are/
            ​    we sing with terror and howl with grief/
            ​    all we have is noise/

Review by Mary Cresswell
Title: AUP New Poets 10
Author: Tessa Keenan, romesh dissanayake, Sadie Lawrence
Publisher: Auckland University Press
ISBN: 9781776711239
RRP: $29.99
Available: bookshops
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Novel believable and informative

1/5/2024

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Call of the Kookaburra
by Elaine Blick

 
When I started this book I discovered it follows two others I haven’t read. But that proved no problem as the story is complete in itself, and the previous stories are revealed easily.
    It’s early in the nineteenth century when two young woman return ‘home’ to England from Sydney where they have spent several years in the very young New South Wales colonial settlement. Jane, who is the main focus of the novel, was a teacher at a school for children of former convicts freed to become settlers by the reforms of the Macquarie government.
    But it is not too long before the pair, now finding life in England too restrictive, go back to Sydney with the intention of making it their permanent home. Hence the title.
    Contrasts between the two countries, their social situations and the different forms of government are woven into the human stories of the women, their friends, their changing lives and loves.
        “Often the conversation would turn to ‘home’ and their life in England….
        Shaw was quite definite about the rightness of this decision. ‘This is a land of
        opportunity,’ he said many times. ‘What future do most people have in England?...

    The human stories with their complications fit well into the setting, in terms of time and geography. A basis of sound research make them believable and informative. In this easy way I learned much about life in the new colony.
    The book is well designed with an attractive cover and clear type in a size that makes reading easy. Clear sentence construction also makes it accessible to a range of readers.
​    The back cover tells me this is the Author’s thirteenth book. I may well look for some of her others.

Review by Norma D. Plum
Title: Call of the Kookaburra
Author: Elaine Blick
Publisher: Strategic Book Publishing
ISBN: 978-1-68235-952- 5
RRP: US$15.50
Available: Amazon;  elaineblickbooks.com
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