Lloyd Jones, editor: Three essays

Reviewed by MARGIE THOMSON

Paula Boock: On Make-Up and Makeover

Margaret Mahy: Notes of a Bag Lady

John Saker: Tracing the Arc

Right on schedule comes the second trio in the Lloyd Jones-edited essay series, objects as gorgeous to have and hold as the first lot, and between them genteely divulging the very bookness of books, in this age where some people speak of the death of them. Such satisfying stock, such completeness of design .

But what about the words? Thankfully, they're a delight as well and, lest you think that "essay" denotes ponderousness, they're not like that at all.

You could read any, or even all, of these in an evening and count it an enjoyable one.

Come on in, the writing's zesty - as aromatic as lime. The trick with essay-writing is to shake a cocktail of the small and large, the particular and the general, with the alcohol of fresh, original thought.

All three of these writers give us something of their personal trajectories through life -- Saker, his basketball career and certain family events; Boock, her journey through multiple female identities up to the point where she sits on the beach at Lesbos, perfectly, comfortably out, yet not at home; Mahy, her eccentric, inventive childhood and idiosyncratically adventurous adulthood -- yet contextualised within broader explorations.

What's really nice are the little overlappings of theme and even of image, so that, although the three are very distinct, there's nevertheless a certain incidental confluence that allows for pleasant moments of recognition and connection.

"Beauty" is always a good one, and it's a wonder there's anything left to say about it - yet Saker still manages to come up with something that, to me at least, seemed new.

Describing the hooking effect of watching his first game of basketball, he comments that "beauty is what you need at the time. I see now that until that game in Newtown Stadium, sport, a big part of my life, had not been supplying me with an aesthetic something I'd been hanging out for".

He's intrigued by the contradictions that empower the concept - "beauty is at its poignant best when under immediate threat by the unbeautiful . It needs an opposite number to be kept honest" - and by beauty's experience at the hands of New Zealand's "smother-tackling", where it emerges as "you beauty" or "you beaut".

"Typical of our way with words," he adds, "no-one can be sure whether you're taking an aesthetic position or not."

Paula Boock, in her essay on our longing for transformation and, as she puts it, for that "perfect calibration between our inner and outer selves", is more concerned to get to grips with beauty as it affects the human body and experience.

Not a fresh theme, perhaps, but the treatment is entertaining and, as a fellow traveller through those years of hairy-legged feminism and out the other side into the lipsticked 90s - "Am I doing this to fit in or to express my quintessential self?" she asks - I found much in her essay that resonated.

She uses Jenny Bornholdt's wonderful shadow image - "As you pass under the light you will sail past yourself into the night" - only to have it echoed by Mahy: "Walking at night I have two shadows - a constant moon shadow and a streetlight one, stretching and shrinking, now in front of me, now behind me."

Mahy, though, is grappling with quite different matters: of the possibilities in a life, of invention, free will and restraint.

Probably not surprisingly, it's Mahy's mind that, of the three, one feels to be the most extraordinary.

She seems to me to be quite unafraid of thought and of difference. Here's her take on a person found to have not only a vagina but a penis, not only a scrotum but ovaries, capable of both menstruation and erection.

"It is rare," she comments, "to be blessed with such latitude" - and she seems genuinely to mean it, to be impressed by, even envious of, such absence of imposed restriction.

These books, each only around 50 pages, are full of quirky variety and the stimulation of ideas for ideas' sake, propounded with verve - good cultural buzz, and so nicely packaged, too.

Four Winds Press, $14.95

We have three sets of these books to give away.

Just write your name and address on the back of an envelope and send it to New Zealand Herald, Canvas essay giveaway, PO Box 3290, Auckland, to reach us by Friday March 28.