Sarah Quigley: Loveinabookstoreoryourmoneyback

By PAT BASKETT*

Screeds could be written about this title: its apparent claim that love is a state realised through a relationship with ideas found in books; that unless you get this kind of buzz from a book you have been deceived and are entitled to a refund; that it expresses a despicable materialism; that it demonstrates the writer's profoundly insecure existential state.

Quigley is probably laughing her head off.

The title is also that of the final poem in this collection, only there the words are separated. It's possible Quigley seized upon that poem because of its affirmation of the community of poets and because it epitomises her process of making poetry. The beginning describes a situation: "I stood/ in a bookstore", followed by a small event: "Their spines felt good/ in my hands", and the moment of poetry wrought out of that situation: "this was a guarantee ... " The final line has a banality which restores the mundane tone of the opening and left me with a slightly let-down feeling: "Love is always to be found/ in bookstores."

Sometimes Quigley does that: builds up and then drops you. But not always. Endings can be the most important part of a poem and some of hers are haiku-like.

Quigley worked hard through the 1990s and now has an established body of work: a short-story collection, two novels and a third, Shot, due next month. She lives in Berlin, since winning the inaugural CNZ/DAAD Berlin Writers Fellowship in 2001.

Last year she was awarded the inaugural Copyright Licensing Ltd Writers Award to complete her biography of Landfall's first editor, Charles Brasch. The Burns Fellowship at the University of Otago will enable her to continue her research in Dunedin later this year.

Her poetry first claimed attention through AUP's New Poets 1 in 1999. Quigley says she wrote her first poem a few years ago when she was running in the rain, that she has been writing and running ever since. Well, yes, these poems have that feeling about them, of belonging in a world of speed, of flux, of the lightness that Italo Calvino held so dear. "Poems are everywhere," she says, "on billboards and biscuit wrappers and on the labels of shirts made in Korea. You just have to look for them. A poem is a strange thing."

Quigley articulates that transcendental moment when an ordinary situation is ordinary no longer. Fear, maybe, a realisation that things are not what they seem; the slippage of certainty into uncertainty; relief, sometimes, when fear drops away.

This little volume with its wonderful cover has three parts. The first is titled "Love, or" and is a series of oblique love poems, some to a child.

The title of the second part, "Money back?", expresses the feeling of hesitancy and deception that haunts the poems in this section. Floating in the astronaut hour has one of the best openings in the book:

Suddenly the future

was nowhere to be seen.

On long pale legs it had run

out of the room/ and into the street ...

The poem I enjoyed most opens the third section, titled "The Bookstore", and is the second of her four pieces called New York Four. Its sustained rhythm matches the pace associated with that city.

Quigley returns to New Zealand in May to appear at the Auckland Writers' Festival.

* Auckland University Press, $21.99

* Pat Baskett is an Auckland journalist.