Monday

An echo where you lie (2017)




<
Jack Ross, ed.: Poetry NZ Yearbook 2017 (March 2017)

Books and Magazines in brief:

Polina Kouzminova. An echo where you lie. ISBN 978-0-9941299-4-9. Submarine Poetry. Wellington: Mākaro Press, 2016. RRP $25. 47 pp.




Polina Kouzminova: An echo where you lie (2016)


Polina Kouzminova was, it seems (I’m taking this from the blurb), born in Russia but raised in New Zealand from the age of 10. There’s an echo of that at the back of her book, where her acknowledgements conclude with one to her ‘grandparents in Siberia, who always told me to read more poetry like Pushkin and to reflect on life’s better moments after dark’.

That’s solid advice, I’d say, and what a wonderful phrase: ‘life’s better moments after dark’! Kouzminova has rather a thing for the dark, in fact. She informs us on the same page that it was ‘at one in the morning when the muse would often come’, and one hears this again and again in her clipped verses: ‘4am. / Cars glide. / Rain. / Singularity of people.’ I like that a lot. ‘When morning comes, the vagueness of my dreams / continues to surprise me.’ I think that this little book will continue to surprise us for quite some time to come.





(27/8-5/9/16)

Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2017. ISBN 978-0-9941363-5-0 (March 2017): 322.

[186 wds]


Poetry NZ Yearbook 2017






No comments:

Post a Comment