SLENDER VOLUMES
by Richard von Sturmer (Spoor Books, $38)
This is one of those very rare collections that is at once thoughtful, coherent and very engaging ‒ calming us in an uncertain world. Von Sturmer, once a punk performer and lyricist for Kiwi band Blam Blam Blam, is a Zen Buddhist. His 300 prose poems here are inspired by ancient Zen lore, written as “kōan” (stanzas), each strictly seven lines long. Most are headed with a nod to Zen masters of old. But while he does sometimes refer to ancient times, most of the poems are in the present. Autobiographical confession is here. Von Sturmer has a delight in small things and their importance – leaves blown about by the wind, a bird landing on a step, the contents of a pantry. The welfare of animals concerns him. Then there are the momentous things, such as the decaying, ever-changing nature of cities, with Auckland as his model. Or war. Or the legacy of distant history. Not that von Sturmer is always deadly serious. Much of the charm is the jocular deadpan way he presents many anecdotes which, in true Buddhist style, leave us to work out the moral. A very readable work.
KOE: An Aotearoa ecopoetry anthology
edited by Janet Newman and Robert Sullivan (Otago University Press, $50)
Koe, a collection of 200 poems, concerns itself with ecology and the health or pollution of the Earth as we know it. All poets but Hone Tuwhare get a single poem, some well-known and others less so. The collection is divided into three parts, each introduced by Janet Newman’s discussions on three eras of ecopoetry – pre-20th century, from the 1930s to 2000, and present day. Much early Pākehā poetry is idyllic, lamenting the loss of picturesque forests and native flora. The first Māori to write in English lamented the confiscation of land. By the mid-century, there were more overt protest poems, against the raising of Lake Manapouri, testing of nuclear weapons in the Pacific and, in a telling poem by Arapera Blank, Conversation with a ghost, the degradation of cities. Protest ecopoems are now mainstream, often with an angry tone, including Tusiata Avia’s Fucking St Barbara, loudly cursing a mining company ripping up a Pacific island, and Tim Jones’ All That Summer, presenting an apocalyptic vision of Wellington drowned by rising sea. A great browser collection and capacious read.
NOW AND THEN:
Poems about generations
by various editors (Landing Press, $25)
Landing Press took a very democratic approach in producing Now and Then, putting out a call for submissions. It received 550 and chose 91. Well-known writers sit alongside first-time writers, and bearing in mind its theme, there is work from the old to the very young. An anthology like this will always be uneven, but there are many plums. The focus is on ageing, refugees, protest, the foods of different ethnicities, assertion of identity and the power of women. Tread carefully and you will find some great work, such as Wesley Hollis’s heartfelt Disconnected, Xavierniva Sao’s Bananas and Taro or Sherrie Lee’s Mama. And the excellent summing up of a Tongan mother in Mele Peaua’s Bring up a child in the way he should go.
Also well worth reading:
A Branch Torn Down, by James K Baxter (Cold Hub Press, $42.50): a large collection of all Baxter’s unpublished or uncollected works in his lifetime.
Endings by Bruce Bisset (Earl of Seacliff Art Workshop, $29.95): selected by David Eggleton, the free-wheeling Bisset’s best work from 1984 to 2023.
Awakening to Timelessness: The Titirangi Poems by Ron Riddell (Casa Nueva Publications, $25): a paean to the pleasure of returning to Auckland’s wild west coast and its natural features.
Hotel Theresa by Doc Drumheller (Cold Hub Press, $28): a poet with US and NZ citizenship writes of many countries and moods.
