Cilla McQueen (in association with the Alexander Turnbull Library). Edwin’s Egg & Other Poetic Novellas. ISBN 978-1-877578-13-7. Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2014.
These are some of the fruits of Cilla McQueen’s tenure as New Zealand Poet Laureate, a post she held from 2009-2011: “My two researchers at the National Library sent me ‘clouds’ of images in no particular order, from which it was my job to discover a possible relationship between any image and any part of the text.” The result is certainly a wonderful piece of bookmaking: beautifully presented in a sturdy slipcase, with each of the eight “poetic novellas” as a little A6 booklet. The contents seem rather reminiscent of early surrealist experiments such as Max Ernst’s Une Semaine de Bonté (1934) or some of Man Ray’s photo-collages from the 1920s. McQueen has been experimenting for a long time in the border areas between drawing and poetry, and her latest move into the “space between prose and poetry” seems, in retrospect, to have been only a matter of time. One can’t help feeling that this might herald some further adventures in cyberspace – possibly the incorporation of online animation techniques in future work along these lines?
(26-27/9/14)
Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 1 [Issue #49]. ISSN 0114-5770 (2014): 233.
[197 wds]
Poetry NZ Yearbook 1 (2014)
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