Field Notes (2018)

Jack Ross, ed.: Poetry NZ Yearbook 2018 (March 2018)

Books and Magazines in brief:

Mary Cresswell. Field Notes. Submarine. Wellington: Mākaro Press, 2017. RRP $25. 68 pp.

Mary Cresswell: Field Notes (2017)

Mary Cresswell decided ‘belatedly’ to describe her latest book as a ‘satiric miscellany, if that’s of any help’ – or so she tells me. Certainly we observe here the characteristic Cresswell fascination with strict forms:

double dactyls, sonnets, ballads, haiku dragged out of word clouds, ghazals, riffs on particular obsessions, homophonic word games, serious observations disguised as humour (and vice versa).

Is there a larger set of concerns on display? Ecology, certainly; male arrogance, passim:

Come into my office, peasant
he said, sit down sit down
I myself can sit down and grasp
the basic principles of whatever

Why does that speech sound so strangely familiar to me? Perhaps because the realm of black humour and despair it inhabits is known to me as well – as in ‘The baggage pick-up at the end of the universe’:

pointme
elseward
passthe
hemlock
nomore
talking

(9-10/9/17)

Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2018. ISBN 978-0-9941473-3-2 (March 2018): 332.

[154 wds]


Poetry NZ Yearbook 2017


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