O'Connor's 10th collection is clever, sharp, intense and a little odd. O'Connor loves experimenting with his verse. Aspects of Reality is full of people and things. ''Watercolour'':
The reading for today - or any day - the same young blackbirds
reworking the lawn for the past century /
a seamless reincarnation of worms in patches of light / a shag sitting above
the inflatable pool / an impressionisttoddler waddling from its symbolist mum
towards the ducks
+
The Woolworth's Variety Club Band strikes up a stirring march!!
O'Connor is inventive and sometimes very cool. Whistling in the Dark is coming soon.
The Rope Walk is a series of poems that have developed over 10 years. McMillan offers up only 24 poems in 36 pages, but this little book is still really neat. The first-edition books are hand-sewn and limited to 150 hand-numbered copies.
Originally from Christchurch, McMillan has returned to that city after spending time in Dunedin.
It was here she came to an understanding of her own cultural stories of colonisation. Most of these poems are harsh: major losses, men being lost in wars, suicides and the bitter thread through all those years of violence against women.
Occasionally there is a glimmer of hope. '
'Sandwiches'':
My grandmother remembers
the old women in the village hall
wailing for Scotland and dancing
on New Year's Eve. She tells me
as if we went together.
The golden floors of the hall
striped wide like some lovely fabric,
the last light through the high windows,
sandwiches, the sad smell of gorse, then
a wild reeling in the dark.
This is an intriguing debut. It never feels comfortable, but it is all the better for it. You can feel the wear and tear of people in McMillan's poems.
As a poet Oliver has always been able to craft poems. He can zoom in on human doings, minds and stories. He writes well. Yet, somehow his star has never really risen.
Oliver is always consistent. In Intercolonial Thomas McCormack is at the centre of this latest effort:
He would gain ''First Order of Merit'' at the International
Exhibition, 1882, Christchurch, for his patent cooking range,
Zealandia, japanned black as a priest's cassock, brass
bars polished bright as candlesticks; his ornamental castings
for balconies, verandas, town railings gaining prize medals
in Melbourne and Dunedin exhibitions, his intricate iron grilles,
panels and gates gracing the entrance way and archways of St
Joseph's Cathedral, finally dedicated (unfinished) in 1886.
Intercolonial has style and a sense of hope.
- Hamesh Wyatt lives in Bluff. He reads and writes poetry.
