Root Leaf Flower Fruit: A Verse Novel by Bill Nelson
(Te Herenga Waka University Press, $30)
The narrator has been injured in a cycle accident. He wants to clear his head by going rural. His grandmother, now ailing, quarrelsome and in a nursing home, has given up her rural house and farm.
Despite abiding twinges from his accident, the narrator takes it upon himself to tidy up and look after his grandmother’s house and fields in preparation for their being sold by auction. This is the core of Bill Nelson’s verse novel, a townie mentally recuperating, learning the toil of farming, and watching the four seasons – root, leaf, flower, fruit – change, sometimes described lyrically.
But there’s far more to it when the narrator (who speaks in verse) discovers his grandmother’s diary – which is presented in prose.
This verse novel is also about the different values of different generations, the outcomes for both grandmother and grandson being strangely heroic. As presented, the grandmother’s final walk is a tour de force.
It’s quite a feat to create a novel-length poem like this. Bill Nelson has done it with panache.
Hoof by Kerrin P Sharpe
(Te Herenga Waka University Press, $25)
Kerrin P Sharpe creates poetry that is pithy and brief. In her fifth collection, she writes on many and varied topics but harnesses them together with the image of a train. It opens each of the three sections in which this collection is arranged. And of course, a literal train can remind us of trains of thought, which can wander everywhere. So, into poems about horses and nightmare and a wonderful elegy for a trumpet player and the wild sea near Hokitika and weddings and funerals.
But some themes dominate. The sea is one and another is the frozen polar regions. In the Arctic Sea, ice shelves are diminishing. The Antarctic yields poems about Scott and Shackleton – but more to the point, chemicals and human interventions are degrading submarine life. A strong conservation tone is struck. Her last and longest poem, “te hau o te atua / the breath of heaven”, is a lament for a small island where the cold wind blows, there is a sense of chilly desolation and glory days of exploration are long gone.
Sharpe expresses herself in a pithy but understandable way, is astute at conjuring up fantastic images, and even while dealing with serious matters, she knows how to be funny. A great gift.
Green Rain by Alastair Clarke
(Ugly Hill Press, $30)
After long years spent in England, Alastair Clarke came back to New Zealand and settled in Wairarapa. Green Rain shows him reconnecting with this country, often with a sort of wonderment at how it has and has not changed.
His forte is descriptive scenes: landscapes, seascapes, places and settlements. It is as if he is re-embracing – and seeing with a fresh eye – the country he came from.
The train shovels its way to Wairarapa. Looking at the hills and mountains that separate the region from the rest of the North Island, he recalls visiting the Tararua Range. The central plateau is awesome with its mountains and cloud shapes. Evening sundown at Waikanae is beautiful. And there is room for satirical poems about Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, ending with a “Letter from America”.
Clarke’s approach is a little old-fashioned and romantic, with his suggestion that the beauty of nature uplifts us, and sometimes too eager in tying abstract ideas to natural scenes. It is, nevertheless, clear reading.
