Chris Price: Husk

By GUY ALLEN

Chris literary name has been founded largely on business activities outside her own writing. She edited Landfall magazine through most of the 1990s. She is the co-ordinator of Writers and Readers Week at the Wellington festival and teaches a course, Creative Writing in the Marketplace, at Victoria University.

Now, with her first collection, she establishes herself as a major and distinctive poetic talent. From her Wellington pedigree, you might expect to find touches of the School of Manhire, such as little epiphanies, a kind of insouciant inquisitiveness and weighty implications under the lightest words.

Instead, Price is cool, even-toned and studious. There is nothing cleverly facile and no sudden bravura. In the best poems, she examines the ingredients of her subject in a deliberate, peering way that makes you think of Allen Curnow.

Hers is a wide and changing perspective. The opening poem, The mirror vendor, demonstrates how it works.

The multiple reflections from the mirror under the arm of the walking vendor all offer themselves as sources of at least interest and possibly enchantment. She comes upon things not with any wide-eyed sense of discovery but in a knowing, often sardonic manner. She applies this equally to the portrait of an

old woman who

looks at her life

star cooling at the

wrong end

of the telescope

and to advice on how to beat a polygraph:

They have calibrated the time fear

takes

to surface and subside, so trust me -

in the heat of the moment

we are lemon juice

on a white page.

Love and lust, science and technology, language and literature - all get the same alluring treatment. This will be an outstanding year for New Zealand poetry if it produces a better book.

Auckland University Press

$21.95

* Guy Allan is an Auckland trade union official and freelance writer.