Ika 4 (2017)

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

Books and Magazines in brief:

IKA 4: Journal of Literature and Art. Ed. Anne Kennedy. ISSN 2253-5993. Manukau: MIT, 2016. RRP $27.99. vi + 146 pp.

Ika 4 (2016)

I suppose that it’s not quite what a reviewer should concentrate on first, but I have to say that the design of this latest issue of IKA is nothing short of breathtaking. I feel distinctly envious, in fact. I love the long spacious pages, the beautiful graphics and even the choice of font.

Moving on to the contents, I suppose (as usual) it’s invidious to single out particular contributions, but it was still pretty exciting to see three new poems by Bill Manhire (who describes himself as ‘a freelance writer with a Super Gold Card’) in here:

My aunt in Auckland
is walking towards Otago
because the North Shore is not the south.
They will catch her at the end of the city
and take her back to where she has to be. (p. 16)

I think I know how she feels, sometimes.

(27/8-5/9/16)

Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2017. ISBN 978-0-9941363-5-0 (March 2017): 320.

[164 wds]


Poetry NZ Yearbook 2017


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Anne Kennedy: The Time of the Giants (2005)

Jack Ross, ed.: brief 32 (July 2005)

Anne Kennedy. The Time of the Giants. ISBN 1-86940-342-8. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2005. RRP $27.99.

Anne Kennedy: The Time of the Giants (2005)

Anne Kennedy is very good at telling stories, especially odd stories which no-one else would think to tell. It seems very sensible of her to concentrate on this strength in her second book of poems from AUP (hard on the heels of last year’s Montana-award winning Sing-Song). There’s a lot here to like, but I’m afraid I’m still left with certain reservations. For a start, there’s the underlying sense of a message in the narrative itself: Moss, the teenage giantess must be true to herself (which means going off and mating with her own outsized kind), rather than scrunching herself up to appeal to a “small-minded” boyfriend. This seems a little too pat to me: the kind of creaking moral which writers of the fantastic do best to disavow (so much of the effectiveness of the Alice books comes from their refusal to preach, and its cruel parodies of those who do).

Then there’s the local colour in the narrative itself which, while undoubtedly well-exploited for dramatic edge, invites awkward questions. How, seriously, are we to imagine Kennedy’s heroine getting in and out of cars, through doors, into beds to have sex, etc. without her lover ever noticing that she’s a bit taller than he is? Oh, don’t be so literal-minded, I hear you say – surrender to the delightful fantasy … Fair enough, but all the All-Blacks-games-on-TV; actual-accounts-of-actual-films-they-go-to-see-and-how-they-got-in-and-out-of-the-auditorium details encourage me to be literal-minded. You can’t have it both ways. Either it’s a fairy tale (in which case I’d welcome less preaching and more of the ironic observation of people and their quirks which is one of Kennedy’s greatest strengths), or else it’s a documentary, in which case logical discrepancies in scene-setting suddenly begin to matter.

I’m sorry. I do think this is a fruitful direction for Anne Kennedy’s work to explore, but I don’t think The Time of the Giants is entirely there yet.

(15-21/5/05)

brief 32 (2005): 105.

[331 wds]

brief 32 (2005)


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Anne Kennedy: Sing-Song (2004)

Jack Ross, ed.: brief 29 (April 2004)

Anne Kennedy, Sing-song. Auckland: AUP, 2003. ISBN 1-86940-295-2. 128 pp. RRP $24.99.

Anne Kennedy: Sing-song (2003)

“These are dangerous days” announces the epigraph of Anne Kennedy’s new book Sing-song. The blurb tells us that this book of poems “seems a natural progression from her fiction,” which does indeed appear to be the case. The “dangerous days” quote is attributed both to Sinéad O’Connor and Janet Frame, which might be said to give us some clue to the territory Kennedy inhabits. It’s not the Winnie-the-Pooh world of Anna Jackson, nor the haunted tundras of Hardacre or Howard. It’s a realm where intelligence doesn’t contradict feeling, where domesticity is not the antithesis of Bohemian chic. The poems, it is true, work better as a sequence than as individuals – there’s some wordiness, some lack of focus from time to time – but that’s essential to her intention, I feel. They steal up on you; they’re disarming. A verse novel, then? That’s a horrible albatross to fasten on anyone, and it wouldn’t be true to accuse this book of being that. Certainly it requires careful, cumulative reading to achieve its effects: in that sense it is prosaic, but it’s worth the trouble.

(1-2/04)

brief 29 (2004): 82.

[195 wds]

brief 29 (2004)


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