Rachel Bush: The Unfortunate Singer

By PENELOPE BIEDER

A second slim volume from Nelson-based poet Rachel Bush (her first, The Hungry Woman, was published in 1997) builds on the reputation she quickly established for enchanting pieces that manage to simultaneously stir the heart and the head.

She is quite unafraid of exposing vulnerabilities and/or eccentricities and each new poem contains its own mood, be it humorous, nostalgic, bemused, sad, or just a sweet, small emotion for a beloved pet.

What she does convey powerfully are home truths and a strong sense of place that can only be New Zealand.

She celebrates the strangeness of the country and its people, and she has lived long enough (she is 61) to remember Cabinet Pudding and Lemon Wonder Pudding, but she also reveals that she is not unfamiliar with a Powerbook either.

As well as poems there are diary extracts and short prose pieces - the title piece first appeared in The Third Century: New New Zealand Short Short Stories in 1999.

In a magnificent tribute to a vanishing generation, the poem The Strong Mothers is a moving finale to the book:

They have tested the last jam on a saucer by a window

comforted the last crying child they will ever see,

and left. How we miss them and their great strength.

Wait for us, we say, wait for me.

And they will.

While I coolly admired the nervy, cerebral brilliance of Bush's lines I was suddenly ambushed (sorry about the pun) when they also brought a tear to my eye. Great stuff.

Victoria University Press

$24.95

* Penelope Bieder is a freelance writer.