Elizabeth Smither, much-honoured poet and novelist, has a new collection of poems that shows her at her very best. Every poem in The Blue Coat pulsates with detail, warmth and wisdom.
This is an album of daily living that reaches for the stars, and birth and death, along with eating a pear or cheese on a chipped Limoges plate. Her marriage of contemplation and poetry has produced work that offers miniature frames on the world ("A grey sky like a governess/in a calf-length coat").
Individual lines hook you, not just in the quiet musical pitch but also in her way of seeing and thinking ("The lemons in the shop are smooth and gleam"). There is the woman weeding next to the calves: "this/harmony of companion weeding and eating."
There is the eulogy for a friend: "time/ran down in the way of flesh/that is coming undone". A lovely collection.
Kate Camp's new collection is short-listed for the New Zealand Post Book Award for Poetry (her previous one was a winner in 2011). Snow White's Coffin is an intoxicating sponge for her experiences during her Creative New Zealand Berlin residency. The poems are most definitely the poems of elsewhere - pocket narratives and philosophical miniatures.
Camp strolls through the world in her poetry shoes, but it is not always physical travel.
She draws upon books read, poems loved, paintings witnessed, as well as the sky and ground. These magical, knotty works react to a fragile world, and Camp navigates the light along with the dark. Terrific.
Sarah Broom's (1972-2013) post-humous book, Gleam, maps the unbearable contours of a life facing death. Each word resonates with joy ("when I look around me/the world is very bright") as much as pain ("these limbs are tender, awkward dancers"). Broom uses big things such as the stars ("I am so thin/the stars can see right through me") and the ocean to navigate lines that shimmer with little explosions of loveliness. The words have found their way from effort and strength, fragility and tenderness, motherhood, sickbeds and love ("It was because he loved her so much/that the clock got smashed and the wings/fell off the day"). Please read this gorgeous, sad, comforting book.
John Newton's third collection, Family Songbook, wraps around you like a view that holds your attention while time stalls. The poems catch the glorious hues and ambulatory beat of the outside (especially down south), but people matter as much as the land. This songbook - and indeed there is exquisite musicality - leads you to the colour and light of story with finely judged dialogue and detail.
Peter Bland's Breath Dances is both reflective and moving. Many poems shine as Bland pays attention to the sensual, earthy details of the world. He is unafraid of ideas (on home: "You have to admire its persistence") and welcomes the inexplicable. As he navigates loss and love, poetry goes into the gaps of his living while the gaps of his living go into poetry.
August 16 is New Zealand Poetry Day.For more information, see booksellers.co.nz
