Psychology, giants and journeys part of year's best poetry

The audience for poetry may be small but it is surprisingly well served by local publishers. As a category advisor for this year's Montana Books Awards I read 29 books of poetry published in 2004, an impressive number.

Poetry tends to attract specialists; 20 of those entries came from just four publishers, one of which, Auckland University Press, contributed seven titles. This looks like being another strong year for AUP, if these three titles are any indication. And, as has become consistent with the Press' books, the high standard of content is matched by pleasing design and quality production.

Michael Harlow's collection is his first for some time but his voice is instantly recognisable: sprightly, elegant, playful, intelligent, considered, precise. It is a voice in search of a language to articulate something of the curious and surreal strangeness of the everyday, as the back cover text aptly puts it, a quality especially evident in The Fascination of Fictions, the prose poems of part four.

The Feet and a Fit of Shoes, for instance, is both comically inventive and vaguely disturbing. Sharing its title with a history of psychoanalysis — Harlow is himself a practicing psychotherapist —Cassandra's Daughter is hyper-alert to how the worlds of dream, myth, magic and art cast suggestive shadows on our daily lives.

Anne Kennedy, best known for her experimental fiction, has turned with success to poetry, following the prize-winning Sing-song, with this compelling narrative poem, The Time of the Giants.

Moss is a 2.2m (7ft 6in) woman, a genetic throwback to a race of giants (the invented mythology of the story melds Irish and Maori). Working in a suburban library, Moss has given up on the possibility of love, until Paul — who is small — turns up as Moss is on her knees, shelving books, and it is love at first sight. The turbulent progress of their affair is dominated by her efforts to conceal the truth about her size. Eventually — no thanks to Paul — she learns to walk tall.

Narrated in a manner that is like a kid's book for grown-ups, this engaging fable easily holds the attention through more than 100 pages, largely through its oddity, wild humour, and marvellous inventiveness of event and language.

Michele Leggott's fifth collection Milk & Honey also runs to more than 100 pages but is made up not of a continuous narrative but by dozens of lyric fragments, sometimes single, sometimes in small clusters, sometimes in long chains like strings of glass beads (as in the 31 parts of "so far"), collectively forming a vast, dazzling verbal mosaic or galaxy.

It is natural to speak of this book in terms of light because the imagery of light permeates from beginning ("and the light shatters") to end ("diffused refracted irradiant/wild light"). This is also a book of journeys, both literal and metaphorical; journeys to places — like Berlin, Portugal and South Africa — where Leggott has read her poems, but also to imagined and imaginary places — Marlene Dietrich's Hollywood Morocco, Lorca's New York, ancient Egypt, Orpheus' Underworld — and, equally importantly, into myth, history and the dictionary.

No brief review can hope to do justice to this dense, intricate and vivid collection. Not to be consumed rapidly like verbal takeaways, but sipped and savoured; soul food, mind food. 

 
* Peter Simpson is head of English at The University of Auckland; he edited Nine New Zealand Novellas (Reed), published this week.

* Cassandra's Daughter, Michael Harlow, Auckland University Press, $21.99
* The Time of the Giants, Anne Kennedy, Auckland University Press, $27.99
* Milk & Honey, Michelle Leggott, Auckland University Press, $27.99