Books

I anticipated reading James Brown’s latest collection with something approaching glee. Two of his earlier collections had given me expectations and they happily turned out to be justified.

The poems are all prose, so there are no titles to go by. The opening one echoes the collection’s title with its mention of broomsticks: “These are effective until their ends begin to fray and snap, creating more debris than they clean away.” But no, our poet doesn’t go on to praise vacuum cleaners! A much graver metaphor is at hand.

Later we get a poem that seems to be about a thimble. Such an unassuming object can be symbolic, however, and the poem goes on to explore this and ultimately its impact on a young girl. Brown’s typically short sentences here enhance effect.

Further poems consider second-hand goods, give job interview tips, describe a peculiar characteristic of horses, and tell us about the Palmerston North version of the game monopoly. I knew Palmy would get a mention: Brown can’t resist a reference to his hometown.

But I was stopped short (if you’ll excuse the pun) when the poet addresses the reader thus: “You were a semicolon in the last printed edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica which ran to 32 volumes.” Brown goes on to lament the lack of printed editions of such tomes. As a semicolon, you gave the reader a chance to consider two connected but discrete ideas, he points out, something sadly lacking in these new all-too-digital days. The final simile here is devastating: “You have been hurried past and swing like a hook and eye between two seams coming apart.”

I can only guess why babies are so much on Brown’s mind. But they figure in several of the concluding pieces, along with their namesake films. Well over a hundred are referenced: I’m sure our poet would appreciate acknowledgement of Zak, who was obviously at his back.

There’s a rhyme in that last sentence. James Brown may be short of them, but that’s prose for you!

They say you can make a poem out of anything. Jenny Bornholdt’s recent collection bears this claim out – balancing banality of content with whimsicality and a fine appreciation of the everyday world. And I welcome her relatively simple language.

In Forecast, the lines “High pressure / and one weak front.” preface a brief but apt comment on the opposing nature of things. Worry opens with the poet’s state of mind before describing her concerns about disturbing stick insects, remarking about dogs “that veered like thoughts / into a tiny experimental / forest,” and recalling her mother’s preoccupation with the gardens of the world. I loved Spring with its delight in vegetables and the interspersing of flowers and birds – all so true to nature.

Mail is an amusing comment on our times – in this case the potential complexities of receiving letters. The poet’s mother lives in a retirement home, but somehow or other mail for the whole family ends up in her mailbox! “Soon after, we move there. All of us. It seems easiest. We have each other and mail comes as regularly as meal times.” remarks our poet philosophically.

For those who appreciate the esoteric, The London Painters should be a satisfying read. It’s a so-called found poem. For the uninitiated, a found poem is a creative work composed by taking existing words, phrases, or passages from non-poetic sources to create a new poem. In this case, more than 20 names are referenced – some painters and some not – of which I was familiar with perhaps half a dozen. A poem about painters that presents an intellectual challenge to readers.

The title Poem with a hole in it recounts an actual hole that needs to be dug for practical purposes, but our poet can think of only one use for such a deep pit: fill it with words. And she does! It’s a useful vocabulary lesson enshrined in literary form.

As for the collection’s title, we’re no better off, but then neither is our poet!

What starts as a story of an elderly couple deciding to sell their home and move into a rest home soon turns into one about regret, introspection, and mollycoddling.

Mary, a retired policewoman, and her husband Pete, a former librarian, are both feeling the aches and pains of old age and have decided the time has come to sell their home and downsize. Suddenly, a phone call from a police detective about the death of their son Will years prior brings up old memories that perhaps should have stayed in the background. This sets the stage for a novel that investigates two lives in all their brutally honest glory: the ups and downs, the laughs and tears, and yes, the heart-wrenching circumstances of their son's death.

I found the central theme of Damien Wilkins’ Delirious to be that life may not always be fair, but it can still be fun, and even though we have to put up with things like loss, guilt, and even death, in the end, it is still worth living.

The main characters are very down-to-earth. There are no superheroes here saving the day; instead, they are just two people living their lives. The story shifts back and forth between past and present, showing readers how Mary and Pete changed and grew over time – before and after Will’s death. This is a great choice for a narrative structure, as it helps us to see how layered and complex the characters are.

While Delirious had a slow beginning, it soon took off emotionally and I found myself wondering how both Mary and Pete would cope with what life had in store for them. The subject matter isn’t the most upbeat and you may find it a little sad to read, but I still recommend this book, because in its own way, it celebrates life and the happiness that can come from even the most seemingly uneventful one.

Setting a novel amid the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a bold and risky endeavour, even more so if it’s your debut. Making the book a black comedy is even riskier. Is the reader willing or able to laugh at situations set amid a very real conflict that has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives?

In Phoebe Greenwood’s Vulture, journalist Sara Byrne is assigned to cover the 2012 conflict in Gaza. She stays at The Beach, a hotel that hosts all the international media, and has local minders who introduce her to key figures on the ground. She is still reeling from the end of an affair with a married man back in the UK and the recent death of her father, a respected scholar, and throws herself into her work.

Sara’s drive borders on self-obsession, more concerned with ‘getting the story’ than with the potential consequences of her methods. She blunders through war-torn Gaza, causing tension with local Palestinians, her minders, the fellow media contingent, and the newspaper she is writing for. She is a refreshingly flawed character and should appeal to fans of Fleabag who prefer their characters a bit messy.

While the book doesn’t shy away from the horrors of the war and the lives lost, the flashbacks to Sara’s chaotic pre-war life in London can’t help but seem trivial by comparison, even if they provide vital insight into Sara’s state of mind.

Greenwood worked as a correspondent in the Middle East, so she’s technically qualified to write about the region and the conflict. As such, Vulture offers insight (and a critique) into the media’s involvement, just not enough to balance the comedy. While the comedic elements lend the book the makings of a satirical wartime tale like Catch-22, they aren’t woven into a satisfying whole. There’s no moratorium on writing about this conflict, and although Greenwood should be commended for not playing it safe here, the book doesn’t quite reach the high standard set by other classics in the satirical wartime sub-genre.

Good Things Come and Go is a heartfelt novel about just that. The good things that happen, and what happens when they go.

For Penny and Adam (known as Riggs), the good thing was their daughter Rose. She would also be the one to go. After Rose dies, and the enormity of her absence lingers, the promise of a solo art exhibition of her work sees Penny return to Auckland after years in LA. There she and Riggs reunite with Jamie, their childhood friend, now temporarily living in his uncle’s bach, he too trying to conquer his own demons.

Their years apart hang starkly between them as they awkwardly navigate the debris left over from a shared past long gone, and secrets long held. Their stories inextricably intertwine with the heaviness of what is the here and now. Author Josie Shapiro propels you headlong into each character seamlessly in a three-way narrative, each one jaded by the aftermath of grief, unfulfilled dreams, and faded friendships.

Shapiro artfully captures the presence of Rose, especially the heaviness of her loss, without being overly reminiscent or flooding the story with memories of her. Instead, grief sits at the edge of their stories, Penny, Riggs, and Jamie.

Penny, the artist with her big dreams. Broken, a mother without a child. Riggs, the perpetual big kid, former pro-skater, addict, fiancé of Penny. Also broken and now childless. Jamie, once a skater too, lost. Broken in other ways. In love with Penny.

Somewhere between the three of them, past wrongs will be exposed, love will be questioned, grief will be explored. With redemption and redefined relationships, each will learn how to carry on together, and apart, when good things come and go.

This book – a first by poet, performer, and storyteller Tony Hopkins – is a firsthand account of the life experienced by an African American man, born in Washington DC, and for the last 35 years resident in Wellington, New Zealand. The book’s cover photos demonstrate the breadth and variety of the cities Hopkins has lived in – readers may recognise them!

And the book itself? It’s chock-a-block with anecdotes, encounters, and observations – some rueful, some startling, and some salutary. Washington DC was the starting point: when Hopkins turned 13, his father told him he was now a man of the house, then added: “The first time you go to jail, I’ll get you out, but after that you’re on your own.”

If Washington DC was the chrysalis, our butterfly has now emerged. The sixties with its race riots had also arrived, and the murder of Martin Luther King Jr in 1968 sparked Hopkins’ initial realisation of identity with his “soul brothers”. Self-described as an angry black man, he headed off to California to join the Black Panthers.

Of all chapters in Black Butterfly, the one titled Streets is the most graphic. Our writer is now living in San Francisco, where there are brushes with police, stints in jail, sexual encounters, and, most engagingly, life with two street hustlers, principally one called Sophisticated Player. Their initiation of Hopkins into street life with all its temptations, dangers, and violence form a powerful picture of Hopkins’ life and times.

Further experiences and reflections on several years in Europe and then, finally, Aotearoa follow. They are enhanced by Hopkins’ tone, and here is where the importance of this work chiefly lies – it’s consistently candid and without rancour.

Six poems accompany the text. The first and last deal with identity – effectively bookending this short but compelling story. “My identity is about who and what I identify with. / I’m grandson to a Cherokee / Although I’m no longer young, I am still gifted and black.” Bravo!

This lengthy collection represents a deeply felt grief enriched by celebration. Tusiata Avia’s father died 10 years ago, and the author confesses that she has kept the work hidden away for the last eight. That’s a clue to the nature of its content: how personally revealing her poems are both of herself and her family.

This is how it was supposed to go consists of an imagined account of Avia’s father’s funeral and the preparations for it. There is a moving reference to what he has been dressed in, namely his Christchurch Garrison Band uniform, and with his hair Brylcreemed as in his youth.

We get the eponymous My father gives birth that begins with a startlingly graphic metaphor: “I think about you in labour that night / birthing yourself out of this world / your pains coming faster and faster”. But there is no epidural for this, notes the writer, and the rest of the poem achingly records the last hours of a man deeply loved and revered by his daughter.

Tender images alternate with practical ones. In Dressing my father we get detailed descriptions of preparations for burial including mention of the injection necessary to mitigate the effects of Samoan sunshine. Most telling of the writer’s conflict about the revelations she’s making is in Dad causes an earthquake when, having experienced an actual earthquake back in New Zealand 3619 kilometres away from Samoa, she asks of her father “I wonder if you’ve had enough of me telling the family secrets  / excavating your bones in public like this – ”

In one of the concluding poems, we get “First anniversary: We go to Dad’s house” where longing for a loved one is expressed thus: “I sit by your grave and the death sickness comes / I’m unsure whether it’s you who are dead, maybe it’s me.”

You are truly alive Tusiata – grieving and celebrating your father and offering us readers the chance to do both with you.

For everything that Julia Eichardt: A Life of Grit and Grace lacks in over-the-top action, it makes up for with one of the most fascinating books I have read lately.

From living an impoverished life helping her mother raise a struggling family in Ireland in the latter half of the 19^th century, to the goldfields of Australia, and finally arriving in New Zealand in 1863 during the gold rush era, Julia Eichardt was a fascinating person with an amazing story. While most of Queenstown’s history is hogged by men, she was one of many women who helped make it what it is today. After working as a waitress and bartender, Julia went on to own and run her own hotel: Eichardt’s Private Hotel, which still stands today on Lake Wakatipu. In this historical novel, we read her journey from the very beginning and see the obstacles she faced as a woman in quite literally a man’s world.

I have always been fascinated by the past and the people who shaped it. Normally we only hear about politicians, or the wealthy who donated land and have a park or a street corner named after them. Very rarely do we hear about the lesser-known folks who collectively kept the busy towns and cities buzzing away, and when we do, we don’t tend to get an in-depth look into their lives like the one author Lauren Roche has provided here.

While this may not seem like a surprise to many, my favourite character in the entire book is Julia herself. Her determination was just so awe-inspiring that I had to pump my fist in the air every time she triumphed and overcame an obstacle. Against all the odds, she managed to achieve her dreams and build the grand hotel that she always wanted to.

She really was someone I began admiring and looking up to, and I think reading about her life could inspire others as well. That’s the power of books based on real people: they can help those who cannot see a way forward with their own problems.

Surplus Women – its title had me intrigued from the start. New Zealand author and award-winning journalist Michelle Duff delivers a collection of short stories that speak to what it means to have and be part of a ‘surplus of women’ in today’s society.

Despite being a work of fiction, each story brings to life women, each vulnerable and imperfect, with complexities we can all recognise.

Easy: the word carries multiple meanings, but said about a woman, it’s never a good thing. It’s the title of the book’s opening story and brings to life the vulnerability and awakening of a young woman growing up in the 90s. In a way it sets a striking tone of what’s to come. The starkness and exploitation in her story is a familiar nuance that can easily exist through the lives of women, irrespective of race, age, and standing. The nostalgia around youth, growing up, and the sometimes-misguided trust afforded to tightly held friendships is inviting at first, but quickly becomes uncomfortable.

I particularly enjoyed the short story Spook about an older woman navigating the inevitabilities of invisibility and irrelevance in a society that reveres youth. But, like a superpower, that invisibility enables her to become a spy after becoming obsessed with a man she thinks is up to no good. It’s preposterous in places yet funny, with a touch of the absurd.

Surplus Women – yes, it intrigued me. Some of the stories are out there, some uncomfortable and unforgiving. But they all bring to the fore the stories of women often deemed unnecessary, unworthy, or without value: think older women, single mums, and sex workers. Without preaching, Duff illuminates a woman’s ability to exist, reset, endure, doing it all wholeheartedly, messily, and unflinchingly despite heartbreak, distress, trauma, and unique lived experiences. Surplus Women holds space for all the women deemed unnecessary as they rile against the expectations that assail them, sometimes successfully, sometimes not.

Dipping into Harry Ricketts’ new collection Bonfires on the Ice is like opening the door to a dear family friend – one whose familiarity embraces moods whimsical, fleetingly happy, often philosophical, but never pessimistic. His first poem embodies all these characteristics: in it, he explains the state of happiness as “A matter of collision: / Right place, right time”.

My delight in metaphor is lit anew by Tangle, in which the image of life as a tangle is sustained throughout. “Now there’s a terrific word, handy / for describing the way life baffles”, the poet begins, and goes on to milk the metaphor for all its worth! There’s a touch of the esoteric in the reference to the linguistic root of the word “tangle”, but we are rescued from puzzlement by an explanation.

How could I not relate to The Lecture 3 with its connotations of classrooms, lecture material, and student reactions? “Most lecturers become / Ancient Mariners in the end” is part regret but mostly philosophical resignation. And the students? Oh boy, Harry – were we students seen through? All those years and yawns ago?

A section of so-called Stella poems features whom Ricketts calls a kind of alter ego. She embodies his philosophy, reflecting alone in nature and reading German books: she writes “Now you must learn / the grammar of grief, the exact syntax / of suffering.” What stellar examples of metaphor and alliteration! References to everyone from novelist Thomas Pynchon to grief counsellor Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and everywhere from Eketāhuna to Mākara enliven throughout.

A delightfully ironic tribute to the western genre of filmmaking appears in A Weakness for Westerns. “Of course there’s almost everything / wrong with Westerns”, our poet begins, and then proceeds to tell us what’s irresistible about them anyway!

Harry Ricketts’ poetry fuses the scholarly and the humanitarian with the ease of an old hand steeped in whimsicality and kindness. It’s a winning combination.  

Jennifer Trevelyan’s debut novel takes the classic New Zealand summer beach holiday and mixes it into a cocktail which is equal parts coming of age, familial discord, adultery, teenage antics, and murder mystery.

We join narrator Alix, the youngest child, and her family of four at a beach house on the Kapiti Coast in the 1980s for what’s meant to be a lazy summer filled with swimming and BBQs. The parents have drifted away from each other – the mother preoccupied with writing a book and a hinted-at affair, while the father tries to maintain a semblance of normality, undercut by his growing resentment at the family’s lack of enthusiasm. Vanessa, the older sister, sneaks out at night to party with other teens and shoplifts at the mall with a friend. That leaves Alix to search for the body of a young girl who drowned at the beach, alongside Kahu, a boy she befriends out of boredom and chance.

Add in the watchful neighbour who ingratiates himself with the family after rescuing Vanessa from a near-drowning, and you have a coming-of-age story that hinges on Alix’s pre-teen understanding of the world and the darker adult realities that surround her. Alix is forced to deal with these swirling feelings and events while realising that the security of her family isn’t as solid as she once believed.

Plot is almost secondary to mood and theme here; while the story does deliver some revelations, they unfold through Alix’s recollection of events rather than any traditional mystery structure. Those looking for a cut-and-dried denouement may feel short-changed, but Trevelyan instead offers a sadder, more fitting conclusion to her story.

A Beautiful Family has already been optioned for film, with Kiwi director Niki Caro presently attached, and one can see why. It’s a recognisably nostalgic slice of dark Kiwiana that swims in the ‘cinema of unease’ New Zealand storytelling is so renowned for.

In Speechless, New Zealand novelist and poet Mike Johnson delivers a book that deserves to be read. It is a coming-of-age narrative infused with magical realism and prose so rich and emotive that it clings to the reader’s imagination. What binds the story together is love, not only between two people, but between a man and the power of language itself.

As a child, Michael Paewai Meer encounters the enigmatic and otherworldly ‘Word Bringer’. This visionary experience awakens in him a lifelong obsession with the symbolic power of words. From that moment, language shapes and shadows his journey to adulthood. Words become the life force of his emotions, the key to his connection with both fantasy and reality, until he reaches a final, transcendent silence that is both inevitable and liberating.

Johnson writes with a lyricism that unsettles and consoles in equal measure. His prose shifts effortlessly from the intimate to the visionary, from tenderness to protest. He captures how words can both illuminate and betray, reminding us of the fragile contract between language and truth.

What distinguishes Speechless is its atmosphere, invoked with a dazzling command of language. The author creates a world that shimmers with profundity. The novel transgresses conventional storytelling, taking the reader into a space where whispered words speak of existential truth and humility. It is a demanding book, but also a generous one, filled with sublime moments that resonate long after the last page is turned.

In an era overwhelmed with noise, Speechless reminds us of the dignity of silence and the peril of losing our connection to words that matter. It is a novel that resists easy definition, yet its ambition and craft make it one of Johnson’s most significant works. Readers willing to enter its shifting terrain will find not just a story, but an experience that deepens their understanding of what it means to be human.