Salt River Songs
by Sam Hunt (Potton & Burton, $24.99)

Reviewed by Vaughan Rapatahana

Colin Hogg, a longtime comrade of Sam, writes in his Introduction that, ‘There is a lot of death in this collection of new poems by my friend Sam Hunt. It’s easier to count the poems here that don’t deal with the great destroyer than it is to point to the ones that do.’ Tika tau kōrero Colin: I fully concur. I do not think that I have ever encountered such a poetic fixation with so much Death previously, except perhaps in the work of Emily Dickinson.

It is when Hogg, later in his rollicking intro’ states, ‘There might be a lot to do with death in this collection, but there is also something even bigger – a sense of timeless wonder … There is so much love of life in these words,’ I am by no means anywhere near as certain. I don’t glean this pastoral romance.

The older Sam does not celebrate or illuminate or – concomitantly – seem to enjoy anything much in life, anywhere near as much as the younger more ebullient-in-verse Sam. Now, never get me wrong here: Sam Hunt is and always will be one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s greatest poets/poet-minstrels. But in this book, there is just too much – for me, anyway – obsession with dead acquaintances, his own deceased parents, much more than anything else the prospect of his own demise – in/about/through and into DEATH pallbearer-ing itself across the pages. Jesus Christ on a camel, Hunt writes as much himself here –

Talking of my new book
a friend remarks
there’s death on every page…

death lurking and leering
each turn of the page…

Death is there – sure

As is life – what little
I can recall right now.
The poems say so too.
[from Both Boots (p. 69.)]

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The Black Widow
by Lee-Anne Cartier (Penguin, $38)

Reviewed by Judith Morrell Nathan

Lee-Anne Cartier is the sister of the Christchurch man found to have been murdered by his wife, Helen Milner, after an initial assumption by police that his death, in 2009, was suicide. The case created a lot of interest when it eventually came to court four years later and was one of New Zealand’s most publicised murder trials. The fact that this book is listed in the top ten for sales and that New Zealand on Air is funding a movie shows there is still much interest.

Cartier reached her conclusions early on, as she found discrepancies in what her sister-in-law was telling her. This book explains how, over a period of years with frequent visits to Christchurch from Queensland, where she lived, Cartier persuaded the police to undertake further investigations and change their minds. With admirable persistence, she questioned neighbours, workmates and members of the extended family, checked texts and emails, and repeatedly reported Milner’s inconsistent stories and unusual behaviour to the police. She confided in many people over the years, often finding they shared her opinion. She pays tribute to a number of people without whose help her quest would not have succeeded.

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Fale Aitu | Spirit House
by Tusiata Avia (Victoria University Press, $25)

‘Reviewed’ by Vaughan Rapatahana

fa’afetai Tusiata, fa’afetai,
you’ve swerved & served us a masterclass corpus
through graft
of tears & fears.

Palestine, New York, Mangere;
street-smart & worldly,
you spill your guts, you bare/bear your soul;
Christchurch, Samoa, Africa;
eerie images rash throughout this weft —
dead people, lost babies, past heroes;
rape, mayhem – they’re just a shot away
missiles, earthquake – they’re just a block away
& as for the atua,
you really have to pray.

tālofa lava Tusiata, tālofa
kia ora mō tēnei pukapuka iti o ngā whiti
ka nui te pai,
nō tāu manawa.
found verse, prose bricks, unattached pronouns;
powerful & experimental,
you angry your past, you pain your hurt;
cathartic, erratic, erotic;
hoodoo voodoo magic wafting a spell —
inequality, iniquity, insanity;
marginalization, victimization – they’re here today
dispossession, violence – they’re near today
& as for the aitu,
they really never go away. Read more »

Futuna: Life of a Building
Edited by Nick Bevin and Gregory O’Brien (Victoria University Press, $50)

Reviewed by Max Rashbrooke

Whenever people ask me about Wellington’s best sights, I always say, without hesitation: you should go and see Futuna Chapel. Almost no-one has heard of it, yet apart from Ian Athfield’s house, it’s the only modern building in the capital that can make my heart sing. It’s also a building that, in its architecture and its history, speaks to both the best and the worst of the New Zealand character.

Futuna, nestled among Karori’s backstreets, was built in 1961 as part of a Marist retreat centre. The Marists wanted a standard chapel: what they got from its architect, John Scott, is nothing short of extraordinary. He designed the brothers a building that, from the outside, soars into the sky, its sharply sloping, triangular roofs proclaiming a Modernist take on the Gothic buttress.

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All Day at the Movies
by Fiona Kidman (Vintage, $38)

Reviewed by Ruth Brassington

Fiona Kidman hands us ourselves as a scrumptious national dish, heaped with goodies (and some baddies) from our homeland. She is not just Dame Fiona Kidman, she is the grande dame of New Zealand writing as she tells it how it is – and was – for us, as real people in this landscape.

Poet, short story writer and novelist Kidman has won many major New Zealand awards for her writing, and brings alive the people who inhabit our land – especially in All Day at the Movies, the title of which is hidden in the text in an unexpected way. As in life, and in the lives of Kidman’s characters, nothing can be assumed.

We meet six-year-old Jessie and her war-widowed mother Irene as they move to sunny Nelson for a new start, with their encounters there leading the family back to Wellington to make another new life by the sea. Backgrounded by the aftermath of the Depression, war, mass workers’ strikes in the fifties through the Springbok Tour protests of the eighties and on into the recent past, the characters – mainly women with peripheral but significant men – in Irene’s expanding family play their parts so realistically they were probably our own neighbours, families, friends or workmates. We travel from workers’ huts in Nelson’s tobacco fields to flats and houses in Wellington, Turangi and Auckland – even going as far north as the Hokianga and as far south as the Mackenzie area.

Kidman’s situations are so real and so close to our people’s real lives that it hurts. This book should be compulsory reading for all politicians, judges, social workers; in fact anyone who has anything to do with managing the lives of others. They might then understand more. People are just people. And anything could happen to anyone, fom anywhere.

All Day at the Movies doesn’t just reflect ourselves; it is us. As Kidman herself says, “Fictions are based on a set of possibilities and probabilities.”

And with her life almost over, the ageing Jessie says, “I think we should stop trying to save all the world and focus on what good we can do for one another in the space we occupy.”

The Quiet Spectacular
by Laurence Fearnley (Penguin NZ, $38)

Reviewed by Ruth Brassington

Against a background of day-to-day family life, librarian Loretta is triggered by a copy of The Dangerous Book for Boys to identify her yearning for freedom and adventure. Some of this yearning is a mis-guided desire for self-sufficient country life but this manifests itself in another way, not too far from home, and it’s not only Loretta who needs a “room of her own” and finds one.

There is teenaged Chance, environmentalist Riva and the local wetlands – as with all Fearnley’s novels, the place is a strong character – alongside all the people she interacts with as she finds she doesn’t have to do this journey on her own.

Relationships between friends and strangers, teacher and pupils, mothers and children, men and women are shown in their quiet or less quiet ways while Loretta assembles her own “dangerous book” notes, interspersed with potted histories of famous women adventurers to help carry the story forward as they accompany her on her path to freedom and adventure. But it’s the relationships between women and their own directions in life, as well as with one another, that are the strongest focus here.

Laurence Fearnley’s previous novels are The Sound of Her Body, Room (short-listed for a Montana New Zealand Book Award), Delphine’s Run, Butler’s Ringlet, Degrees of Separation, Edwin + Matilda (fiction runner-up for the Montana) and Mother’s Day. The Hut Builder won the 2011 New Zealand Post Book Award for Fiction; Fearnley has also received a Creative New Zealand grant, an Antarctic Fellowship and a Robert Burns Fellowship.
The Quiet Spectacular is more surprising than it is spectacular. But then so are most of our lives. Perhaps that is the point – we can all find freedom and adventure around us if we are open to it. There’s no need to sail the ocean to look for treasure.

A History of New Zealand Women by Barbara Brookes
(Bridget Williams Books, $69.99)

Reviewed by Alison McCulloch

It was the creation stories that grabbed me. In the first chapter of her epic History of New Zealand Women, Barbara Brookes places a version of the Māori creation story alongside that of the Pākehā colonists, setting the scene for how each society saw women. The contrast is startling.

For Māori, the world emerged (in part) through the union, and separation by their offspring, of Rangi (the Sky Father) and Papa (the Earth Mother). It’s an intricate story with myriad twists and turns that, Brookes writes, “presented models of powerful women: of a female element to be reckoned with”.

Compare that to the Christian creation story of a lone male God, the model for man, where woman is created as an afterthought, “a helper fit for him” (as Genesis has it). What’s more, that “helper” is also a temptress, responsible for the Fall who must be punished: “I will greatly multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children, yet your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.” (Genesis again, quoted by Brookes.)

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On 8 June, the finalists in the New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults were announced, and among them is a longtime Scoop Review of Books reviewer, Nikki Slade Robinson, for her children’s picture book The Little Kiwi’s Matariki.

Photo by Neil Hutton.

Following is a Q&A with Nikki about her life, inspiration and work:

Where were you born? Te Puke – though I only lived there until I was 1 month old.

Where do you live now? In paradise, near Ōpōtiki.

Where did you go to school? Woodlands School and then Ōpōtiki College.

What were you like in school? I drew heaps. I have a maths report that says I should try not to draw quite so much in my maths book. (Don’t get me wrong, maths IS important, it’s just I understand it better when I turn it into pictures.)

What was your favourite book growing up? Tons! I loved helping unpack the cartons of books at school from the National Library Service. Miffy was the first book I remember getting hooked on. Some of our books at home had been in a school fire and they had smoke marks on the pages, and smelt smoky but I loved them just the same. Dr Seuss was utterly awesome. Then I got into Cricket magazine, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Tolkien, Harriet the Spy… there’s just too many to name.

Who is your favourite children’s author? Wah! How do I choose? There are wonderful NZ authors that would have to top the list – Margaret Mahy of course, Jack Lasenby, David Hill, Des Hunt, Joanna Orwin … there are just so many now writing such fantastic young adult books that to list them all would take ages. But they are all wonderful so hunt out kiwi authors next time you go to the library or bookshop!! Read more »

Rent a Bridesmaid
by Jacqueline Wilson (Penguin Random House, $35)

Reviewed by Sophie Robinson

‘Very pretty sensible nine-year-old… will attend any wedding ceremony… very small rental…’ That’s how Tilly’s Rent-a-Bridesmaid advertisement reads, in Jacqueline Wilson’s newest title, named of course Rent a Bridesmaid. Tilly (a.k.a Matilda) lives with her dad, her mum having left. Tilly is sensible, tidy, a little bit shy, and loves gorgeous girly dresses. Especially if they are raspberry ice-cream pink coloured!

One day her best friend Mattie (a.k.a another Matilda) gives Tilly her used-once, raspberry ice-cream pink bridesmaid dress. Unfortunately Tilly doesn’t have a wedding to be a bridesmaid at. Mattie is somewhat a tomboy and is quite happy to hand over a girly dress. Together, Mattie and Tilly hatch a plan for Tilly to hire herself and the dress out as a bridesmaid. Thanks to the advertisement, Tilly succeeds in attending three different weddings. She finds new relationships in unexpected places, and also learns quite a bit about her existing family and friends, not to mention herself. She reconnects with her mum … ‘Are you my actual real mum?’ The story has a satisfying, happy ending which feels just right.

As with previous Jacqueline Wilson titles, it’s a great read, I enjoyed it just as much as the others I’ve read. You don’t need to have read any previous titles however to enjoy this one, it’s a stand-alone not a sequel. Highly recommended, for girls 8 – 11.

in a slant light — a poet’s memoir
by Cilla McQueen (Otago University Press, $35)

Reviewed by Ruth Brassington

My pen’s a wand I dip into magic liquid –
memories stream out like bubbles on a breath

Cilla McQueen: Poet Laureate, Burns Fellow, Honorary Doctor of Letters, Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement – put these and her other awards in a list and we could make a “found poem” for McQueen. But her work is her own and this memoir not only tells her stories but is filled with poesy and, occasionally, shopping lists.

Diary-keeping forms the basis of much of this memoir – as with earlier poems – and we are led gracefully through the waves of her life as she sails through both rough and smooth waters. Some of us can identify with some of her young memories: I, too, am from a time when “Books and radios are all”. Childhood naughtiness was sometimes worth the adults’ disapproval — I share her pleasure at pulling out the neighbour’s seedlings one by one to hear the sound of each plant’s withdrawal; the “prickly tobacco scent in Dad’s tweed sportscoat”. And:

In the large lead shoe X-ray machine
at the back of the shoe shop, our skeletal
feet appeared at the press of a button.

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