Book critic Anna Rankin reviews Some helpful models of grief by Hana Pera Aoake on Radio New Zealand National as part of the Jesse Mulligan Afternoons programme.
Also covered: The posthumous Notes to John (2025) by Joan Didion.
Petroglyphs by Craig Foltz is reviewed by Mary Macpherson in Landfall Review Online.
While the book’s design and structure are significant, the real excitement of this collection lies in being inside the poems, where, true to the poet’s promise, words flit around the edges of sense. The dense prose poems of INTACT are fuelled by absurdist lists and mini pronouncements, which allow Foltz to skip nimbly from one assertion to another to create elusive surreal worlds. At times there are playful searches for taxonomy but what we’re left with is the brush of a poem as it glides by.
Reviewed by Tulia Thompson in Takahē.
Lemalu’s extensive use of direct quotes and pop culture references sometimes means that imagery doubles back uncomfortably. In “neo” he writes the superb, ‘search for the perfect blossom / and you wont find it / they are all perfect.’ I imagine the laden branches of warm pink blossoms that I once saw in springtime Vancouver, then feel disheartened upon realising that it is a reworked quote from The Last Samurai with a serious long-haired Tom Cruise and a serious case of what theorist Edward Said would call ‘Orientalism.’ I am left with the aftertaste of cherry cola.
Reviewed by Erik Kennedy in Landfall Review Online.
For what is essentially a bunch of smashed-up china in a pile, the prism and the rose looks remarkably good. It reads very easily, and even enjoyably. As you can imagine, it’s not simple to quote this kind of writing, even for review purposes. Just say a bunch of film lines in your head and you’ll be halfway there. Other, non-film sources are sampled, too. A book about the Canadian painter Agnes Martin, for example. I had to laugh when I got to ‘REM’, which is almost certainly a copyright violation—it’s just the lyrics to the song ‘Losing My Religion’ with a fun Easter egg of Aram Saroyan’s poem ‘lighght’ smuggled into the famous Michael Stipe line: ‘That’s me in the spotlighght / Losing my religion’.
Book critic Anna Rankin reviews the prism and the rose and the late poems by Schaeffer Lemalu (1983-2021) on Radio New Zealand National as part of the Jesse Mulligan Afternoons programme.
Also covered: The Financial Colonisation of Aotearoa by Catherine Comyn, published by Economic and Social Research Aotearoa (2023)