Review special: Poetry round-up

Gavin McLean reviews Crest to Crest, Tornado and Other Stories Written Over Time and The Trouble Lamp.

CREST TO CREST
Impressions of Canterbury Prose and Poetry
Ed. Karen Zelas
Wily Publications, $34.95, pbk

A strong sense of place runs through three recent publications from small presses.

Crest to Crest actually takes place as an organising theme, dividing writers' works into sections headed Coast, City, Plains and High Country.

The subtitle "impressions" is literally true.

The anthology's 230 pages cram in the work of 78 contributors, often just a single poem or a page or two of prose.

The work is also fresh.

Although Denis Glover gets mentioned in despatches, the classics such as Lady Barker have been left out.

Most of the pieces are either previously unpublished or they have been published within the last decade or so.

First-time writers, even schoolchildren, share space with established names such as Apirana Taylor, Fiona Farrell, Harvey McQueen, Jane Stafford, David Eggleton and Rachel McAlpine.

Also unusually, Crest to Crest blends fiction and creative non-fiction with non-fiction, and poetry with prose.

Some of the best pieces are memoirs or short history articles.

Standout ones in this last category for me were Harvey McQueen's reminiscences about childhood days on Banks Peninsula and Judith Doyle getting high in the high country.

The sheer variety of Crest to Crest makes it a rewarding companion, and an idea worth emulating by an Otago editor.

TORNADO AND OTHER STORIES WRITTEN OVER TIME
Paul Maunder
Maitai River Press, $24, pbk

At just 100 pages, Tornado is a short collection, but most of the pieces are written with depth and real feeling.

Only Paul Maunder's last third of the book, which contains the shortest works, slightly disappoints.

These pieces are inspired by historic events such as Gate Pa, Gallipoli, the 1951 waterfront dispute and the 1981 Springbok Tour, but do not have the emotional punch of the earlier ones.

Maunder observes that the many of his stories "have a strong connection to place", Wellington, the West Coast, Samoa and Poland.

One of the best is set in Petone where an elderly widow listens to the traffic go by.

That sets her memory going, of a wartime affair with an American serviceman, an abortion, of her confession to her husband recently deceased.

"Now she can smile at the memory, at the material objects in this neat square room, at then cask of ashes."

THE TROUBLE LAMP
Richard Langston
Fitzbeck Publishing, $25, pbk

Dunedin-born poet Richard Langston's collection ranges widely over life and place.

The places range from Wellington to Otago; he writes about sharing an Asian meal in North Dunedin; a sunny spring day in Civic Square in Wellington when "even the librarians look loveable"; swimming at St Kilda beach with his brother; skiing at Lake Wanaka and burying his father's ashes at Pounawea.

While Langston tackles subjects such as ageing and death, he is certainly not a gloomy writer.

Quite the contrary.

A streaker at the cricket is "a hairy pink-skin-full of beer."

He writes a poem to his old bike: "your sagging chain, your ripped tongue of seat".

He can also smile at ageing, writing of 50-year-old sons who have become so like their fathers that "it frightens and secretly delights them ... their mantelpiece of achievements burgled".

He's particularly good on the stages of the life cycle - the birth of a child, a note to his son and a long cycle on the terminal illness and death of a father:

Our father is a lone boat
Sailing a white sai
lA lone sailor,
Far from any shore.

• Gavin McLean is a Wellington historian and reviewer.