Bird murder (2014)

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

Books and Magazines in brief:

Stephanie Lash. Bird murder. ISBN 978-0-473-27649-2. Hoopla Series. Wellington: Mākaro Press, 2014.

Stephanie Lash: Bird Murder (2014)

Stephanie Lash is a poet and archivist who lives in the Aro Valley, Wellington. Bird Murder, her first book of poems, the second in the first group of three short books published by Mākaro Press’s “Hoopla Series,” is “a gothic murder mystery telling of the demise of a ruined banker, set in the not-quite-fictional town of Tusk.” It’s hard to avoid being reminded of Dorothy Porter’s splendid detective story in verse, The Monkey’s Mask, first published twenty years ago, and subsequently made into a somewhat lacklustre feature film, with Kelly McGillis in the lead role. Why haven’t there been many more such narrative poems since Porter started the ball rolling? It does seem like an excellent way of condensing and sharpening a narrative down to its bare bones:

The flagstones
were white too and
wept salt, hardly, and cold fell, every corner.
[“A tenant in the attic,” p.9].

(26-27/9/14)

Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 1 [Issue #49]. ISSN 0114-5770 (2014): 233.

[160 wds]


Poetry NZ Yearbook 1 (2014)


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