Histories of the Future (2015)

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

Books and Magazines in brief:

Martin Edmond & Maggie Hall. Histories of the Future. ISBN 978-1-877010-67-5. North Hobart, Tasmania: Walleah Press, 2015. RRP $AUS 20. iv + 100 pp.

Histories of the Future (2015)

I guess the fact that there’s a blurb quote from me on the back cover gives a clue that I’ve already had a certain amount to say about this book. There are some wonderful essays / prose poems in here. The opening piece, “Second Hand Life” with its evocation that older Auckland Martin Edmond calls “Rain City” will stay in my mind forever, I think: especially the parenthetical account of Charles Frances, long-forgotten 1960s New Zealand novelist, author of Johnny Rapana, Ask the River and other books – who but Martin would know about him, or his apparent foreseeing of the Crewe murders? “What Instruments We Have Agree,” about the death of his mother Lauris Edmond (never named, but clearly evoked), is almost unbearably moving. And Maggie Hall’s photographs are far more than illustrations: they have their own narratives and intertwinings, the purity of image surviving even grainy newsprint reproduction: benefitting from it, in fact, perhaps.

(26-30/10/15)

Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2 [Issue #50]. ISSN 0114-5770 (2014): 271.

[179 wds]


Poetry NZ Yearbook 2 (2015)


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