Generation Kitchen (2015)

Jack Ross, ed.: Poetry NZ Yearbook 2 [Issue #50] (November 2015)

Books and Magazines in brief:

Richard Reeve. Generation Kitchen. ISBN 978-1-877578-92-2. Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2015. RRP $25. 61 pp.

Richard Reeve: Generation Kitchen (2015)

It’s been quite a while since Richard Reeve last published a book of poems: not since In Continents (2008), in fact – the long poem The Among also appeared in that year, but only in a handprinted, limited edition. Since then he’s qualified (and practised) as a lawyer, and taken a prominent role in a good many environmental disputes. But what has he been writing? There’s a new simplicity to some of these poems, the sombre “Crust”, for instance:

Whether we lived or died, it does not matter.
We lived and died. We died without living.
All of this was possible, yet we ignored it.
We lonely lives slinking home in the dark.

which sounds like a modern coda to Baxter’s “High Country Weather.” Others display those lovely long lines so characteristic of Reeve: “Like the man who justified his suicide attempts with the answer, ‘it’s cheaper,’ / it moved with an inscrutable logic” (“Winter Storm”). Great stuff!

(26-30/10/15)

Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2 [Issue #50]. ISSN 0114-5770 (2014): 273.

[172 wds]


Poetry NZ Yearbook 2 (2015)


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