KEY POINTS:
Shonagh Koea is a New Zealand novelist who has published her memoirs in The Kindness Of Strangers (Random House, $34.99).
The book I love most is ... actually 12 books. A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell is a 12-novel sequence that follows the lives of four boys who attend the same school and by the end of the chronicle have had deeply different but often curiously linked lives, if much of a life at all. For example, Charles Stringham, who at the beginning seems to have every advantage, dies in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, having led a particularly tragic existence.
A Dance to the Music of Time is witty, brilliant and wonderful.
The book I'm reading right now is ... Lucky Bastard, by Peter Wells. Again a novel that covers quite a sweep of years. In post-World War II Japan, much-decorated soldier Eric Keeling has to investigate a war crime. But in doing so does he actually commit one himself? This is the question the book poses. It is also about the erosion of the decades, the attrition of time.
The book I'm going to read next is ... The Earth's Deep Breathing: Garden Poems by New Zealand Poets, edited by Harvey McQueen with photographs by Gil Hanly. This is an exquisite little book, like a jewel.
McQueen writes in his introduction. "By the sweat of our brow we seek to restore some lost Eden - the shadow of Milton's Paradise Lost hovers over the English-speaking literary consciousness about gardens.
"Down the ages, people have taken their grief or love out into the garden. They have brought the garden into the house."
To come into my house with pickings from the garden is one of my greatest secret pleasures and I have not really known why till now. There are 92 poems in this wise, clever book and the featured poets include New Zealand's best and greatest.
- DETOURS, HoS
