Books

“Can you be underground / When you start writing poetry in your 50s?” asks Lisa Maule, author of Revelation Valley, a collection of poems published to coincide with her performance piece of the same name. This small but impressive book shows that you can!

Maule’s preoccupation with racial matters becomes evident in Dear Future Karori, which begins “In the past this suburb Karori smelt like convolvulus and / micro-racism”. I delighted in similar touches of humour lending lightness to serious subjects. I even enjoyed her overuse of a certain expletive when describing life, and her disgruntled reaction when, as a school pupil, she had Katherine Mansfield shoved down her throat!

I loved The pull of the bull in which Maule humorously describes a bull as a male cow. Hooray! Punning comes into its own: “This doctrine has moved in by stealth / These were Popes humping Westminster”. (A papal decree was known as a papal bull). The poem’s impact is enhanced by such a brutal analogy.

I also loved Inspired by Aoraki, subtitled an ancestor poem, where Maule laments her actual or metaphorical grandmothers thus: “My grandmothers are English and Scottish mountains / They have been mined for coal and ore” and continues in a similar vein describing the exploitation of natural resources occurring everywhere.

Karori is recalled again in Places of conflicted feelings. Maule remembers her family home in images some readers will recognise: “custom made wooden joinery / a fancy Formica bench. A cupboard for trays, a double sink”. These pieces of nostalgia are followed by a series of clever two-liners juxtaposing then and now. I am admiring Maule’s linguistic ability coupled with a lively imagination.

What sets these poems apart is that they signal the likeability of the writer. Maule is not resentful, aggrieved, or angry – emotions that steer writing in a particular direction. Instead, she brings a lightness, a tolerance, humour, and above all, an optimism to her work. This is best signalled in a line from her last poem Jagged and rolling. “Go to the dangerous dark joyous place. Art absorbs / tension.” Her work is an example of just that!

Black Gold is an evocative title and one that captures the theme and content of this collection. With James K. Baxter as its inspiration, the poems metaphorically dig into the soil of Aotearoa and celebrate the treasures therein. Here are names and places we recognise with nostalgia and praise, poetically framed by writer Mark Pirie.

In the first eponymously titled section, we learn that the author keeps a notebook, just as Clive James did, in which he stores literary tips and gems. “Poets mine for gold,” he says, “of similes, metaphors, symbols, onomatopoeia, rhetoric, metonymy…” Great vocabulary for budding poets.

Closer to home is a homage to poet, publisher, and Paekākāriki railway bookseller Michael O’Leary. In Labouring, Pirie likens O’Leary to poet Hart Crane, who dropped out of school to become a labourer: “Like Crane / you moved between the twin worlds of the academy / and the earthiness of the street.” Such double-sided life experience is recommended: second tip for budding poets!

In the section titled Tangi is a heartfelt tribute to poet Hone Tuwhare and his poetry collection Small Holes in the Silence. In On Reading Small Holes in the Silence, Pirie describes his admiration for Tuwhare thus: “Hone you were a Giant Kauri, / Still are. How would my / small roots be around you?” Memories and tributes to family members also feature.

And what about the section titled Black Sheep? I hadn’t heard of Edward Tregear, a British immigrant, who, the poet tells us “then lived for months with the Māori / never sighting the Pākehā / you left behind.” He wrote several books, plus a dictionary of Māori-Polynesian words and founded the Polynesian Society. “Only imaginative people really live,” Tregear is quoted as saying, and he was surely one of them.

The real black sheep are a bunch of boy racers in a poem of the same name whom Pirie remembers with fondness from his student days. This is a racy account!

James K. Baxter died at just 46. The 46 Pirie poems of Black Gold honour one of our greatest literary figures.

I still remember when an EC120 helicopter flown by New Zealand businessman Michael Erceg went down in the bush over Raglan in 2005 and was not found for over two weeks. The trees masked the copter so well that searchers at the time said, “It was almost impossible to spot.”

The terrible story elicited morbid fascination amongst the nation. Like everyone else, I wondered how an entire helicopter could simply disappear.

Green Sea: Lost in the New Zealand Bush, the latest book from award-winning author John Summers, takes us on a non-fictional ride into the psychological journey and shows us just how easy it is to get lost in the ‘New Zealand outback’.

Included are interviews from survivors who have been lost, and anecdotes from years past about people who underestimated the bush and paid for it – sometimes with their lives. Through Summers’ writing, we see just how small humans really are in the scheme of things, what being lost actually means, and the savagery of nature in our own backyard.

All at once, the book conveys the beauty of Aotearoa while vividly showcasing how dangerous it can be to the uninitiated. Summers' writing literally took me into the heart of the country, and I was glued until the very end.

The only real downside is that if, like me, you are a life-serving couch potato, Green Sea may not inspire you to set forth into the great unknown – indeed, you might be tempted to lock the doors instead and never venture out! However, don’t let that stop you! If you want something to read that’s insightful and well written, and you are an outdoorsy type who is interested in search and rescue and fascinated by how people get lost – and then found again – then Green Sea is something to look into. Especially as we move into Christmas and the New Year.

Margaret Jeune and I have several things in common: we’re both poets, we share the same first name, were born within a decade of each other, and from the first poem in her small but highly readable collection The Monk’s Chair, I felt an affinity involving landmarks and relics from the past that kept me happily reading to the end.

For much younger readers, appeal lies in the title page with enticements such as Glue, Free Speech, Open Mic Poets, and TV News.

I was particularly touched by An Encounter, which describes a meeting with a homeless man on the streets of Wellington surviving on next to nothing and depending on the kindness of strangers. After offering food and conversation, “I am the one who was blessed by the encounter”, remarks the poet.

An interesting question is posed in Free Speech, a mantra I have long been suspicious of, and Cataclysmic carries a justifiable warning about the world’s possible fate. Open Mic Poets also struck a chord. “The poets reveal their personalities / By how they hold the floor” is a sage observation. Take note open micers!

Mother Nature is just one example of how this writer takes a serious subject and by couching it in accessible language increases its impact. We don’t need the esoteric to explain, illustrate, and warn, especially when it comes to matters of literally world-shaking import. Our poet makes no bones about the all-too-possible fate we and our planet may suffer.

The final poem, appropriately, is Legacies. “When we die, what will our legacies be?” Never think this question is banal – oh, you younger readers! Jeune considers it as we all must and concludes as we all must: the eternal question remains just that.

It’s a fitting note with which to conclude a wistful, thought-provoking collection.

In Orchids and Camellias, Ginny Yang is newly widowed and forever looking over her shoulder, held prisoner by a past that assailed both her and her late Chinese husband Deming.

On the run from her father and his cretin-like cronies, Ginny has no choice but to fight a fight she never asked for. Set in Nelson in 1869 and beyond, her sole motivation is to care for her son Liang. Ginny searches far and wide for allies in a world that sees no place for her or her mixed-heritage child.

Forced into a fleeting and transient existence, she moves through Nelson, Wellington, Christchurch, Dunedin, Queenstown, and Arrowtown, navigating each unforgiving and equally unkind landscape set on destroying her soul, removing her voice, and oppressing her child.

Author Sophie Rogers starkly captures the grit and muck that discrimination brings. Fuelled by despair, Liang the child, then young man, is heartbreakingly aware his face is unwanted and unwelcome. Through his very existence alone, he knows there is no escape from the harrowing discrimination thrust upon him and his father years before.

Orchids and Camellias is a vivid historical telling of one woman’s strive for acceptance, played out amidst the backdrop of a time where women were fighting for their voices to be heard and unrest over prohibition was stirring. Ginny’s love and dogged determination to care for her child in the face of much adversity and emotional turmoil is both humbling and wrenching.

In Orchids and Camellias, Rogers conveys a racism so deeply embedded at the time that it is encouraging to follow Ginny and Liang’s search for a place of peace and safety. The novel certainly held my attention to the very end. I was expecting a different ending though; the one I had imagined played out tidily in my head, but it was a great, captivating read all the same.

As the title suggests, Joseph Trinidad’s debut essay collection Lucky Creatures has proven to be an incredibly fortuitous read, nestling itself tenderly within my bookshelf and heart. Unfeigned and authentic, Trinidad’s writing provides a real rarity: familial intimacy. Adopting the reader as an honorary member of his pamilya, he dishes up a sensory medley. Prose-like in style, minutiae breathe life into the seemingly mundane. The age spots on Mami’s hands, Eleng’s salt-and-pepper hair, Papa’s foil pouch of prunes intertwine into a visceral image of family.

Immigrating from the Philippines at a young age whilst coming to terms with his gay identity, the author materialises his hardship with heartbreaking sincerity. “A graveyard almost convincingly dressed as a postcard”, his family bade goodbye to all the places they knew, “leaving everyone, the living and the dead”.

As a queer individual with an immigrant family, the nuances within Trinidad’s experience mirrored those of my own, verbalising struggles I have yet to put into words. To me, the most poignant aspect of this text is the portrayal of parental foreignness.

Moving during childhood is difficult, but a child’s identity is still unfinished. Their language is still forming, sense of belonging still taking shape. They can learn new words, new customs, new ways of calling somewhere “home”.

For the migrant parent, there is no such luxury. They are the ones who leave everything behind – their language, their culture, their community, the familiar contours of a life they once knew – so that their child can inherit a world larger than the one they were born into.

Growing up, I never considered what my parents had lost. That, much like the Trinidad family, identity had shifted from a physical location to the abstract. This type of isolation carries an inescapable weight, bearing “the same skin, the same voice, the same vices”, yet somehow feeling perpetually displaced.

There is a peculiar sadness in realising that your whānau is foreign. Not foreign to you, necessarily, but to the place they have been asked to call home. Perhaps that is the greatest fortune of Trinidad’s collection. It does not simply tell a story about immigration, queerness, or family; it gives language to the spaces between them.

Fleur McDonald’s latest rural crime story The Missing invites the reader to tread the dusty streets of Kalgoorlie and its desert surroundings in Western Australia.

During Missing Persons Week, teenager Max disappears after a late-night party. Local detectives Angie Sullivan and Jack Higgins (from McDonald’s previous Kalgoorlie book The Prospect) are assigned the case, but come under pressure from Max’s parents and Lily, a tenacious radio show host who has been digging into the town’s growing list of unsolved missing persons cases.

The book tackles two timelines: the investigation into Max’s whereabouts and Max’s story leading up to his disappearance. The latter plot offers insight into Max and his desire to escape Kalgoorlie and his domineering father. It is interesting as it allows us to see Kalgoorlie from the perspective of the town’s youth, some of whom, like Max, yearn for something beyond the town’s borders.

Unfortunately, the main storyline, which takes up most of the book, is hindered by stock characters who are difficult to distinguish from one another. Angie and Lily have such similar backstories (both came to Kalgoorlie after broken relationships) that they seem identical, with only their job descriptions separating them. Jack also has a similar backstory, and while this points to the town’s transitory nature as a place where people come to escape their problems or forget the past, the sameness doesn’t do the lead characters any favours. McDonald, who pivoted from rural romance to rural crime in recent years, writes with a strong sense of place, particularly of outback Australia and the people who inhabit it, but this applies largely to the peripheral characters rather than the core cast.

McDonald's writing brings to mind Stephen King’s maxim that “the road to hell is paved with adverbs”, which I agree with. Coupled with a denouement that strains plausibility, The Missing missed the mark for me. But McDonald has sold over a million books and has another due out next month, so I am clearly in the minority here.

Growing up is not easy, no matter when or where you were raised. Each generation has its own unique challenges, and the lessons we learn and that stick with us help us become the parents we want to be. 

TikTok star and one of New Zealand’s biggest online celebrities, Louis Davis explains what being a parent means to him in his new memoir The Modern Dad. Throughout the book, he explores his childhood in Te Tai Tokerau in New Zealand's Far North, the lessons he learned from his parents, and how he implements those lessons in his day-to-day life as a dad now.

I really liked this book and found it quite interesting. Despite his internet fame, Davis comes off as extremely down-to-earth, and his writing is easy and enjoyable to read.

There is one section in particular that I loved. Davis’ Māori heritage is extremely important to him, and he dedicates an entire chapter to breaking down the depiction of Māori fathers as violent and angry characters like Jake the Muss in Lee Tamahori’s Once Were Warriors. Davis explains that, traditionally, Māori men were playful, gentle, and friendly toward their children. In fact, many early missionaries to New Zealand noted what good fathers Māori men were – they were certainly not just warriors. Tackling the past and the present, this chapter dismantles the incorrect perception of Māori as bad fathers then and now. Davis sets the record straight, trying to dismiss a stereotype that circulated even before the movie came out in the 90s. 

Modern Dad would suit a reader either thinking about having kids or who has just had one and is looking for a little advice. Either way, it is a great read. Don’t go into it expecting a how-to manual though – I suspect they do not exist!

If you see this book, do not hesitate to pick it up. Modern Dad might be one of the best memoirs I’ve read all year.

For the Love of Matthew is one mother’s story about her son Matthew. Maria Di Leva says she wants it to give hope to other parents out there who may be raising a child with special needs. In her memoir, Di Leva recounts Matthew’s story, from his early childhood right through to the 30-year-old man he is today.

What strikes me most is Di Leva’s heartfelt and deeply personal reflections of her journey as Matthew’s mother, as his friend, advocate, and lifelong champion. She gives an honest and unwavering account of Matthew’s life, from the life-changing diagnosis he received as a young child of severe autism with ADHD, to the independent, flourishing son she and his wider family know him as today.

In For the Love of Matthew, a strong and insightful Di Leva explores Matthew’s potential every step of the way, whether navigating the school years, a time on medication, or different plans and strategies – like supporting him to catch the bus on his own, which consistently and importantly grew Matthew’s independence and widened his opportunities.

It is very apparent throughout the book that Matthew is part of a tight-knit family and peer group. It is especially rewarding to read about how he has experienced the world his own way. He was selected for the 2023 Special Olympics World Summer Games in Berlin, where he proudly brought home a silver and bronze medal. He’s found a passion for hip-hop and a stable routine of keeping busy with work at New World and flatting independently.

Often, it is the people who stand behind you – who believe in you, fight for you, and push open doors that would otherwise remain shut – that make the intangible tangible. Matthew has achieved his own goals and independence, with the support of a loving family and a mother’s unwavering love.

By all accounts, the journey has not been easy. But Matthew’s mother hopes that this book “demonstrates that with faith and love, the impossible is possible.”

From New Zealand author Tim Corballis comes this new novel NOVA, which explores issues we do not normally see in science fiction.

Set on a self-contained spaceship named Nova that is hurtling away from Earth and on its way to a new home on the star Telos, the novel explores the lives of the ship's inhabitants and the AI running everything, System. Nova is a generational ship, and the entire trip to their new home will take 60,000 years. This means that several generations will be born and die before they ever reach Telos. In NOVA, it’s been 300 years since the ship left Earth, and its inhabitants have completely lost touch with their original home’s roots.

Unlike other science fiction novels that see AI systems running amok or taking over the world, NOVA’s AI wants to understand the humans around it and struggles to do so at times.

A lot of novels treat supercomputers or AI as just machines, but System feels genuinely alive and, if I did not know any better, just as flesh-and-blood as the other characters. In fact, System became my favourite character. Its conversations with Kalla, a human with her own problems, make up the bulk of the story as they talk about topics and themes ranging from consciousness to the human condition.

While the other human characters are interesting and well written, it was Corballis’ rendering of System that made me think as no other science fiction novel has before.

Be warned: this is not Star Trek or Star Wars. NOVA will make you think about things you do not normally associate with science fiction, and that may put younger readers off. I believe it’s a novel for the more mature reader out there. I may have been in the Star Wars camp when I picked it up, but I stuck with NOVA and found it a fantastic read. 

The title of this first collection by Haro Lee is provocative – redolent as it is of short stays, hurriedness, and possibly secrecy. When these are backgrounded by the activity of watching television, we get poems that sing, shout, celebrate, and rebel: all the elements of troubled tempestuous youth. Haro Lee may be troubled, but her experiences also cause her to confront herself with astonishing honesty. And it’s this that makes her work so compelling.

The section Daytime Television starts us off. How to Refill a Disposable BIC Lighter has the writer and a friend holed up with cocaine and companionship. “For five short days / we’re adrift on something so / magical. It’s a girls’ world / in this filthy apartment.” Laughter, grief, and confession abound, and the writer is left with the eponymous lighter as a precious souvenir.

We progress to Primetime Television. If I wasn’t primed already, From These Gutters, My Mother would shock me with its graphic images. We read of a “Botticelli belly” and “This mistake she makes / with the father, the one / who enters growing girls / without clumsy” and what the baby after arriving is subjected to.

I really enjoyed Needing Religion at Nineteen. Our writer admits to her dissatisfaction at being born in the Year of the Rat – that is until she sees an exhibition of Banksy’s rat series and what he has to say about it. “OK, I’ll take that for why I’m here then”, she declares. Self-doubt and longing for assurances – not least of an afterlife – predominate. Once again, frankness is paramount and appealing. “So when it’s my time to go / I can say that I tried.”

Graveyard Slot is a lengthy narrative recounting Lee’s life in a small neighbourhood in Seoul, capital of South Korea and home to her beloved grandmother. Detailed, graphic, and touchingly nostalgic – if ever there was material for a TV documentary, this is it!

Breton Dukes’ breakthrough novel, Party Boy, delves into the harrowing effects of toxic masculinity and its inclination for self-destruction. Rather than offering a sympathetic antihero or a straightforward villain, Dukes presents a man trapped between a bleak present and an even bleaker past.

On the verge of turning 50, Marco faces his midlife crisis with the emotional maturity of a volatile teenager. Bitter, sexually frustrated, and clinging to the faded glory of his youth and masculinity, he turns to alcohol and pharmaceuticals to numb his mounting inadequacies. As his high-school years resurface to haunt him, Marco must decide whether to take responsibility for his prior actions as a school bully, or to drown them in substances.

Amid the turmoil of his youth, his adult life has been put on the back burner. Unable to uphold the responsibilities of a part-time job and fumbling as the stay-at-home dad, Marco’s desperation to be seen as the stoic male stands in constant conflict with the realities of his shortcomings. In the place of reason, addiction becomes his “burning ray of confidence” – one that slowly sets fire to his world.

This downward spiral becomes the perfect vehicle for exploring the pressures of traditional masculinity and the damage it inflicts. Throughout the novel, Dukes examines the extent to which men internalise rigid gender expectations and the consequences of treating vulnerabilities as weaknesses.

We see this further emphasised through the pulsing, intrusive nature of Marco’s insecurities and thoughts. Combining short, staccato lines with a polished, stream-of-consciousness style, Dukes jerks the reader deep into the psyche of a man who is balancing everything and nothing.

Its frantic rhythm mirrors the raw desire to fix the irreparable; to watch, hopelessly, as your ego goes cold in your hands. As unsettling as it is compelling, Party Boy is the type of book that lingers. Not because it comforts, but because it refuses to look away.