Books

How does Nick Ascroft regard himself? This is the question that pervades my mind on a reading of It’s What He Would’ve Wanted. Or perhaps contemplation is a more accurate word. The title’s eponymous poem gives voice to the writer’s supposed quandary: how important is he? Or, for that matter, his last wishes? Almost every set of lines in this poem expresses mutually exclusive reactions to the death we must all submit to. One of my favourites is: “If my funeral planner is reading this wondering what I would’ve wanted, appreciate that I would not have wanted a funeral planner.” There’s defiance too. “In life I was haunted by regret, so in death I will flip the roles and haunt it back.” I just hope our poet gets his final wish!

The Time I Shook Allen Curnow’s Huge Paw is a delightfully self-deprecating verse celebrating several brushes with famous literary figures. Aspiring poets may envy “and oh the time I talked at Keri Hulme.” Aspiring poets who disdain rhyme / may also come to realise / rhyme’s not actually out of time!

I can’t let Dire Diary go without a wince! A visit to the dental hygienist who ministers – albeit tenderly – to our poet’s gumline evokes memories of lost love, of desire, of love in general. But from love we go to courage. “It takes bravery to throw yourself at someone.” Though “I don’t mean my hygienist” keeps us on track. Take courage reader – Ascroft is urging you to!

He now lets loose with some vulgarity in Old Farts, excused perhaps by his reference to playing Scrabble, avowedly one of the poet’s more intellectual activities. More rhyming here – evidence that humour and rhyme make an effective combination. Vulgarity gives way to ribaldry in Synonyms for Vag – heads-up for a vocabulary lesson!

As a nod to today’s mundane world, one of Ascroft’s final poems constitutes an ironic lament for supermarket payment methods: Do You Wish to Continue? Yes please, Nick – and I hope this review is what you would’ve wanted!

After reading The Futures of Democracy, Law and Government: Contributions to a conference in honour of Sir Geoffrey Palmer, I have a renewed appreciation for the laws that make up our society. While I was just a boy and not interested in politics when Sir Geoffrey took office, I can now honestly say that I retroactively appreciate him.

Starting as a law professor and then an MP representing Christchurch, in 1979, he went on to help form the fourth Labour Government as their justice minister. He was responsible for helping to develop many acts in this capacity, including the New Zealand Bill of Rights, before becoming our 33^rd prime minster in 1989.

The Futures of Democracy, Law and Government is a series of essays by eminent judges, scholars, and politicians who discuss elements of his career in public affairs. The book explains why things are the way they are and the role political parties play in our Westernised democratic system, touching on human rights and the Treaty of Waitangi as well as a host of other things we sometimes take for granted.

My favourite part of the essay collection was finding out about Sir Geoffrey’s understanding of the environment and how climate change would affect not only individuals but businesses as well. There was a need, as the book says, to safeguard the environment for future generations.  

Despite being a very thorough read, I never felt intimidated by the subject matter of The Futures of Democracy, Law and Government. While I am by no means a politician, the writing was easy to follow and I was able to grasp many of the concepts laid down. While I enjoyed the book and it made me appreciate the laws that are in place today, I can see how someone who isn’t into politics to begin with might not be convinced to start tuning in.

In short, if you love politics, I wholeheartedly suggest picking this book up. Even if you don’t, I still recommend checking it out to see if it’s for you. I suspect you will not regret it.

In The Stars are a Million Glittering Worlds, Central America promises to be an all-encompassing escape from the guilt-ridden shores of Aotearoa for Thea. There, she joins Chris, the elusive man she’s thought of exploring the possibility of having more than friendship with – until he introduces her to his girlfriend Sarah.

Despite Thea and Sarah’s initial reservations, the three fast become an inseparable trio.  Author Gina Butson brilliantly captures the heady nature of their friendship, played out in San Pedro La Laguna, a Guatemalan town on the southwest shore of Lake Atitlán. Beautifully expressed, it’s easy to imagine the vibrant place, rendered eloquently by Thea’s imaginings. San Pedro is where the hum of energy seems to inexplicably hold the trio together with the strength of shared friendship and the intoxicating pull of a different culture and way of life. One albeit tainted by the seedier side of drug trading life. An emerging catalyst of discontent soon reveals itself.  

Wonderfully written, each of the four parts of The Stars are a Million Glittering Worlds purposefully builds a narrative that is gentle though not passive, interchanging the past and present. When tragedy rewrites the trio’s journey and the nature of their intwined relationships, Thea finds herself far way again, this time in Tasmania, Australia navigating a new relationship of sorts.

It's a relationship and span of time that will test her, make her search unknowns, rail against past and present trauma, and rally against unanswered questions. Ultimately, it will lead to her figuring out a literal and metaphorical way home that is paved with resolution, self-exploration, and forgiveness.

At times throughout The Stars are a Million Glittering Worlds, I thought the story may end a different way. The lives of Thea, Sarah, and Chris seemed to hitch frequently on happenstance and an undercurrent of doubt, with understandings between the characters that to me suggested a different outcome… until it all panned out organically in a way that made sense.

What do you do when confronted by the current and impending horrors of today’s world? If you’re a poet, you face up squarely in the best way you know. And in Erik Kennedy’s case, this means writing a collection titled Sick Power Trip. Here are poems that take their themes from both human behaviour and the natural world and couch them in language that dispenses with disguise. From wistful to cynical, from challenging to harshly judgemental, Kennedy dissects what we’re experiencing with poetic deftness.

I Like Rich People, but I Couldn’t Eat a Whole One Myself is an especially graphic example, with grandly cynical lines like “Billionaires are just ordinary people / who throw away / their electric toothbrushes / every night.” Yet such cynicism is balanced by the poet’s acknowledgement of our shameful commonality.

Enclosure of the Commons 11 is a nostalgic reference to old-style ownership. Yet it asks the question “Can anything really be ‘owned’?” and concludes with “You don’t get very far saying / that everything belongs to everybody.” By contrast, Soft Power looks to a time when animals could not only speak but were to prove more entertaining than humans! “They were oracles, troubadours, bards, soothsayers, heartthrobs.” If only!

Wistfulness forms part of Kennedy’s poetic vocabulary. It’s best exemplified in An Only Child Poem in which an overheard conversation in French on the bus suggests that the speaker is paying tribute to a beloved mother: “his dear mother who wanted the world / for him to be big and full of boulevard views”.

Most searing of all perhaps is one of Kennedy’s concluding poems: Bystander Poem; or a Gaza Poem which begins with “If you can listen to the stories and not shudder, / you have a refrigerated beetroot for a heart.” Graphic, thrusting, and a cold reminder of our universal awfulness. We may not be complicit, our poet seems to say, but we’re not exempt.

Sick Power Trip is a saddening and salutary journey into self-awareness made universal.  

I don’t think I’ve ever before used the word “groundbreaking” to describe a book! I’m using it now because I’m reading Secret Art Powers by Jo Randerson. This book is so overwhelming that I had to stop reading it at intervals to fully experience and come to terms with my feelings of joyful recognition. I am a theatre practitioner and reviewer, so Randerson’s reflections, experiences, and observations, grounded in their love of theatre, resound especially strongly. That said, there is a wealth of material to interest and challenge other readers and even quirky illustrations “crowdsourced during sessions of group drawing”, Randerson acknowledges in their foreword.

“Art is a way of being,” Randerson continues, and this volume goes on to expand on that theme, and perhaps even more importantly, on its implications. The six powers they write about are explored – one might even say exploited – in the interests of art and the artist. None more so perhaps than their first power, which they title Lies. What could lies have to do with art? Plenty, Randerson asserts. Many truths exist and they are sometimes in conflict with each other. “The truth is rarely pure and never simple”, as Oscar Wilde wrote in The Importance of Being Earnest. And art can and does describe realities that have their own truth.

The secular world, and the political one, have difficulty with such a wide-ranging concept. Witness the pitifully small financial support given to artistic endeavours in this country compared to the vast amounts allotted to sport! I’m tempted to say that those in charge of such decisions suffer from a severe lack of imagination, sensitivity, and any valuing of the place of emotional response.

What does exaggeration in a theatre piece matter if it makes an important point? Why shouldn’t irony and satire be acceptable as ways of exposing wrong or corruption? These and similar arguments are skilfully and passionately presented by Randerson in their six parts: Lies is followed by Fluidity, Multiplicity, Wrong, Live, and Imagination.

Secret Art Powers has the subtitle: How creative thinking can achieve radical change. This book is a giant step in that direction.

This is Rebekah Burgess’ third poetry collection. She is described as being “possessed by a genuine poetic spirit”, and reading Hope Floats, I found myself agreeing. “Genuine” is surely important and in this case signifies the sincerity of undisguised emotion and a welcome lack of intellectualising feelings and experiences. Missing is trendy social commentary and smart clichés about nothing in particular.

The first of the three sections is titled The opposite of love is fear. The initial poem Reduced is one of her most powerful. About her mother “screaming for her own voice”, it embodies not just her mother’s plight but that of others, especially women, at the mercy of circumstances beyond their control. Strawberries (should be a celebration) makes reference to COVID lockdowns and creates a metaphor memorable for its aptness.

In the second section, titled Peace, a lengthy poem commemorates Burgess’ great-grandfather Donal. The first two lines “The intoxication / Of a country life” set us up for nostalgia, wistfulness, and gratitude. If anything could entice us to exchange our urban life for a rural one, this would be it!

Speaking of rural, we get a centrepiece of prose that amounts to a brief autobiography expanding on the writer’s thankfulness for such a life. It concludes, however, with regret and warnings of the present times and their intimations for a doomed future. We forgot continues the theme, concluding with “we must remember / what life was / our gains / (not social) / are damned / ill-got.” An especially powerful photo emphasises this theme.

Motherhood consists of experiences and reflections on that theme. What a woman carries borders on the philosophical: “just as the one that made me / was always in my mother, /and the one that made her / was always in her mother.”

The suggestion embodied in Burgess’ title is where our writer is coming from. Her cover photo enhances it. Thankfully without anger, aggressiveness, or fancy language, she embroiders her theme with a needle blunted by gentleness and – well – hope.  

In Everything She Wanted, the opposite of the title turns out to be true. The ex-‘boyfriend’ of the past became everything author Martinette Williams didn’t want. In her debut novel, she carefully unfolds what feels like a time capsule from a period of her life that until this book, she had been yet to put to bed. Inspired by her own journals and songs written 10 years prior, Williams has created characters based on her real-life story.

Everything She Wanted centres on Madeline and the intoxicating pull of Daniel, a twenty-something musician that she is undeniably drawn to time and time again. Despite being pushed and pulled like a puppet on a string, she’s the underdog in a carefully engineered sport where one minute she’s a friend, the next an all-out friend with benefits, a pseudo girlfriend, a ‘pretty girl’, a close confidante, the next a nobody. Michael, Daniel’s best friend, finds himself a witness to the unhealthy relationship, wishing he could be with Madeline and do better.

Madeline’s journey of self-discovery recollects the heady, youthful feelings of passion and desire for relationships to be the stuff movies are made of but rarely ever are.  

Williams, a singer-songwriter and now published author, has included five songs she wrote back in 2012, each fraught with the feelings and words born of riding such an emotional roller coaster. All her songs can be streamed online by readers on SoundCloud. When Daniel tells her she’s not the right girl for him, and never will be, Madeline pens the song Everything I Wanted. The first two lines really sum up the song and the book.

“You were everything I wanted, just sitting there.
I couldn’t stay away – I’d follow anywhere.”

Something quirky and distinctive happens when a musician becomes an author and vice versa, opening up a whole new artistic lens. Williams offers a unique opportunity to take a pause from the page to instead listen and absorb the musicality of her words and the emotions deeply rooted and rendered throughout.

Everything She Wanted is a cathartic narrative of a story left untold, but one that’s weighed the heaviest.

Don’t be put off by the esoteric title of this remarkable collection. ‘Cycle’ is the operative word: each essay describes fascinating ways in which the present can be read in the past. We’re talking fossils here, dear reader. The distribution of ammonite fossils, for example, helps scientists to map previous iterations of our world, asserts audiovisual archivist and author Una Cruickshank.

‘Previous iterations’ have wide-ranging implications. I found one of the most riveting in the essay titled Waste. Sperm whales are under the microscope here – metaphorically speaking. Their voracious appetites involve ingesting octopus and squid amongst other delicacies. Trouble is the giant squid’s body includes indigestible parts like beak and eye lens. And what happens to those? If you’re amongst the fashionable rich whose perfume preference is Chanel, don’t read on! Waste indeed.

We are beholden to whales for many things: Cruickshank lists 20. Next time you ingest vitamins, use a tennis racket or a fishing rod, wear a corset, or open a parasol, spare a thought for the creature responsible for its beginnings.

A Little Spark May Yet Remain has as its opening sentence: “There were countless ways to die before your time in 18^th century London”, surely a reader enticement. Frequent drownings gave rise to an exploration of various ways to revive or resuscitate – one of the most notable being that of the thwarted suicide of Mary Wollstonecraft, who went on to write A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. A little spark in that case became a big one.

Later, electricity in the form of shocks and even electric eels to revive the dead captured the imagination as well as the pockets of the wealthy. As a sideline, we are informed that “London pornographers began offering electric eel erotica”. Well, there’s nothing like sex to revive the spirit!

Cruickshank says she wrote the book to ward off “existential dread”. She may not have succeeded in such a lofty aim but her meticulously researched and idiosyncratic findings will surely offer a welcome respite.  

From being appointed Queen’s Counsel in 1994 to being the first New Zealander elected to the International Court of Justice in 2006, I think it is safe to say that Kenneth Keith’s work as a barrister and judge has hit all the highs it possibly could. It is fitting then that he would write Without Fear or Favour: A Life in Law, a book that delves deep into the intricacies of law.

In this memoir, we learn about international law and how it can apply to the laws we have at home, plus how it affects Te Tiriti o Waitangi in New Zealand. The breadth of Keith’s knowledge truly astounds as he digs into issues such as human and information rights, piracy, and much more. He has great passion and respect for the law, and it is clear to see why: without proper safeguards to protect us, everything would be thrown into chaos and the somewhat peaceful life that we have all grown accustomed to would literally go up in smoke.

My favourite part of the book was learning how international and national law interacted with each other and sometimes overlapped. I appreciated the real-world examples Keith gave, which made me realise how immensely complicated it all is, and how much hard work a barrister has to go through to get the job done. 

My only negative is that if you do not know much about law or are uninterested in the nitty gritty of it all, you may not be able to follow everything in this book. But if you keep at it like me – a reader with no legal background – I think you’ll be able to overcome these obstacles and enjoy what is on offer here. My recommendation is that if you have an interest in law, give Without Fear or Favour: A Life in Law a go because there can be no greater teacher than Kenneth Keith.

It’s hard not to be impressed by Kirsty Baker’s Sight Lines: Women and Art in Aotearoa. With its lofty heftiness and fabric cover, it’s a work of art even before the first page’s turn.

What Baker has compiled is a stunning account of the extraordinary creative genius of women across Aotearoa: those who have come before and those who continue to create in contemporary times. 

Not limited to one genre, Baker offers an almost panoramic view of an art history constructed by women that – though not exhaustive by the author’s own admission – spans mediums and decades, from curators and photographers to sculptors, poets, and writers to name just a few.  

What’s interesting is how Baker has brought the artists’ collective and individual voices to the fore, their words as fluid and engaging as the art they have created. Through images and essays, their storytelling is reflective and impactful. The book covers the influences, history, and connections to time, place, and space that have informed the artists’ work. Political, cultural, societal, and gendered contexts wind, thread, and integrate like branches through both the narrative and the art, sometimes subtle, sometimes profound. 

I found artist Yuki Kihara’s work Quarantine Islands interesting. Much of it focuses on challenging societal norms and concepts. Through a series of lenticular photographs made during the global pandemic, Kihara speaks to the themes of isolation, contagion, and quarantine. It’s like the present meets the past. “The series of work follows a long history of human confinement across the land and ocean that she pictures”, Baker writes.

This collective and collaborative account from Baker and contributing writers is nuanced, interesting, and bold, told through the eyes of women. I thoroughly enjoyed this striking collection and I’m sure it will resonate with many art enthusiasts.

The Anatomy of Sand is an extraordinary poetry collection with an esoteric nature that enhances the already salutary content and tone.

Mikaela Nyman’s grasp and use of English is strikingly confident and erudite. As a poet myself, I do sometimes question, should reading a poem require a dictionary? Does a lack of plain English make a poem inaccessible? Reading The Anatomy of Sand, I frequently needed to check out a mythological reference or the meaning of an unfamiliar word or technological term. Take, for example, The Hybinette process. Impressive! What is a Hybinette!

Imagine a poem in praise of hyperaccumulators: plants that are apparently capable of pulling out high concentrations of certain metals! Ah, but the notes help: we learn that this poem contains found descriptive language about Nyman’s great grandfather, an inventor of – wait for it – extractive metallurgy. “He was a Victor and a Noak, a Noah of the Nordics. Metal was his ark.” “Yet did he ever pause to consider?” asks his great granddaughter. The final lines set the theme of further poems and let us know our poet has her own ark.

I loved Whakapapa in a whalebone church – recognised all four whale types! It’s a heartfelt tribute to both the writer’s Nordic roots and her current dwelling place of Taranaki.

Black swan diaries is easier on the intellect with its notes of familiarity – if an unwelcome one. Recalling the days of COVID and lockdowns, here are some truly memorable poetic vignettes: “Teddy bears pop up in cars and windows”, “sourdough refuses to rise”, “people of Chinese origin are being snubbed”, and “we know how to craft a mask from the armpit of an old T-shirt”.

Examining as it does our relationship with nature and the environment, involving both laments and suggestions, The Anatomy of Sand is unquestionably a book for our times.

Set in the backdrop of a Japan recovering from World War II, Rising Sun Falling Rain is about forbidden love and all the pain that comes with it.

As a child of mixed ancestry, the central story of Mick Mitchell and his lover, and later his wife Emiko, struck me harder than it perhaps would another reader. Like them, my parents came from different worlds, and like them faced opposition in the face of traditional norms. It was not too long ago that even in a country like New Zealand, mixed marriages were almost taboo. This is the situation that Mick and Emiko find themselves in when they fall in love and break tradition by marrying.

Trish Devine’s writing is amazing. She captures the atmosphere of post-war Japan perfectly. Rising Sun Falling Rain never shies away from the harsh realities of war and its devastating effects on the average person. Some of it just rips your heart out, and the fact it’s based on real-world suffering adds to the book’s atmosphere.

Devine provokes heartfelt empathy for the characters and their circumstances. The two main characters feel alive and I loved watching their story unfold. My favourite aspect of the book was Emiko’s arc as she goes from a wide-eyed innocent who had always been sheltered by her father and other guardians to someone who becomes more self-aware. Mick’s journey was equally as satisfying: from small-town farm boy to suddenly being thrust into a world where the customs and adherence to age-old traditions must’ve boggled his mind.

If you love drama then you will love Rising Sun Falling Rain. While it deals with some weighty issues regarding love, acceptance, and pain, there are moments of genuine joy that made me smile – Mick’s fish-out-of-water approach and moments of Kiwi ingenuity often got a knowing chuckle out of me.

This was a lovely read. If you like a good tearjerker with solid characters, then Rising Sun Falling Rain will be the book you are looking for.