Three little books from three New Zealand poets. All of them are impassioned, wise and engaging, polished and confident. Grab all three. They are all short, punchy and excellent.
Her new collection The Darling North has seven new poems.
Kennedy stretches language, plays with form, explores space and, like that early poem, reshapes fairy tales. It is always exciting reviewing a book of her poems.
Kennedy is married to Robert Sullivan and teaches fiction and screenwriting at the University of Hawaii. She admits she is a magpie about culture and some of what she observes ends up on the page.
This new collection shows how Kennedy enjoys rhyme, is inspired by her faith and loves narrative and romance in poetry.
The Darling North finds Kennedy gazing north. Voices cry, tell stories and bellyache about a whole lot of things.
Hills are remembered in "My Carbon Gaze". Kennedy is never afraid to take risks:
Don't answer, son, said Dad. I said hey ho snoutface applegob.
Son! said Dad. Why I oughta, said Big Pig.
Hey ho
hamsam mustysauce. / Why I oughta. /
Hey ho spittypanbacy
rind. / Why I oughta. / Son, this is getting out of hand
or trotter. / Hey ho pork-fried sweetysour.
/ Why I oughta. / Hey ho
schnitzelfunken gebriskenmuffin. / Get woughta! yelled Big Pig
The Darling North is potent, beautiful, abrasive and meaningful.
These poems stretch out and make things really interesting. Kennedy is no slacker. She is one prodigious blossoming of talent and wit.
Common Land, her new collection, mixes poetry and prose. Davidson explores connection and communication.
There are pieces about the death of her first partner, a mother suffering from Alzheimer's disease and trips to quite a few different places: along river road, overseas and in gardens.
Davidson's poems have that way of maturing into something warm and resonant. She knows how to slot in interesting touches. Her elegy to Alistair Te Ariki Campbell "Colour and Matter" is irresistible and solid:
Have gone and all is undone
Undone Tongareva in her pearlshell blanket
Undone the grey Dunedin orphanage
Undone Wellington and its heady weather
Undone the Pukerua cliffs, home, the dogs, the shuffling footfalls
Undone wild honey (gone back to bee)
Undone colour and matter all undone
Returned to words -
And in the powerful way of powerful words
Begins again.
Common Land slinks into the room with poems that sound true. The short essays capture the intensity of feeling that owe a debt to her past. This book hangs together naturally leaving the reader free to enjoy the view as the ride progresses. This is another book full of energy and imagination.
Like Kennedy, Heath twists a few fairy tales in the first section of this book. Many of her poems concentrate on real people, Galileo, Marie Curie, Rosalind Franklin amongst others. Having completed an MA in creative writing at Victoria University, her poems are assertive, exciting, daring and captivating. This is a new poet with everything to prove.
"Truths":
Let's not talk about
The whole truth.
Better to let small parts
speak for the whole -
look, a hand
in the small of my back.
Better to find that
the truth lies
in the smallest things we do.
• Hamesh Wyatt lives in Bluff. He reads and writes poetry.
