Paula Green & Diane Brown: Crosswinds, Learning to lie together

Crosswind a book in three parts, is Paula Green's third book of poetry. The first part is about landscapes here and in Italy. Green combines sensuality with a spare eleganceand has experimented in the second part, with poems accompanying 15 works by New Zealand artists.

Green invited each artist to produce a new image in response to a poem she wrote after encountering their art. The result is a cool, clever mixture of art and literature, handsomely reproduced by Auckland University Press.

In the final part of the book, music is added. It was written after listening to albums from the poet's record collection from the 70s, the decade during which she came of age. Echoes of fine songs, repetitions from the blues, "and the trembling touch of time just lost/ or the sound of the keyboard's note, soft/ intoxicants".

Following last year's travel memoir, Liars & Lovers, Diane Brown has produced a second collection of poems charting the unknown territory of middle age, as she leaves her beloved Auckland to set up house in Dunedin with her new man, writer Philip Temple, to whom the book is dedicated.

These are wonderfully accessible poems, and nothing escapes the poet's eye. Brown tackles every human emotion, riding the alarming rollercoaster of a new relationship, negotiating, talking, writing, dealing with her homesickness and the longing for her children — and the sea in Auckland: "missing the blueness/the sparkling/ promise of it all/ always the paradox".

Brown views her new life with something approaching a tender astonishment. But these well-crafted, witty, satisfying poems are about love, above all, and on this subject, Brown speaks with ineffable wisdom.



* Penelope Bieder is a freelance writer

* Crosswinds: Auckland University Press, $27.99

* Learning to Lie together: Godwit Press, $22.95