Fallen Grace (2014)

Jack Ross, ed.: Poetry NZ Yearbook 1 [Issue #49] (October 2014)

Books and Magazines in brief:

MaryJane Thomson. Fallen Grace. ISBN 978-0-473-28152-6. Wellington: HeadworX / The Night Press, 2014.

MaryJane Thomson: Fallen Grace (2014)

The Night Press is a new venture from Mark Pirie’s well-established publishing house HeadworX, designed as a convenient harbour for occasional chapbooks and the poetry journal Broadsheet. Judging from this first collection from Wellington writer and artist MaryJane Thomson, it’s intended for a more questing, more – dare I say it? – experimental voice than HeadworX proper.

This is the book of your times,
Stage to stage, from Atlantis to Babylon.

So says her poem “No direction,” [p.14] only to continue: “In the meantime you Babel on.” That’s a bad pun, a very bad pun – I like it. There’s a satisfying breadth and grasp to Thomson’s style of writing, as evidenced here: she’s prepared to break out of any too rigid confines of the vernacular into the slightly more studied, but never (thank God) the pompous or affected. A fine debut volume.

(26-27/9/14)

Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 1 [Issue #49]. ISSN 0114-5770 (2014): 237.

[153 wds]


Poetry NZ Yearbook 1 (2014)


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