Work
Sarah Jane Barnett,
Hue & Cry Press, $25.00, ISBN 9780473333331
Tender Machines
Emma Neale
Otago University Press, $25.00, ISBN 9781927322345
Soundings of Hellas
John Davidson,
Steele Roberts, $20.00, ISBN 9781927242957
Looking out to Sea
Kevin Ireland
Steele Roberts, $20.00, ISBN 9781927242926
I’m looking at another pile of rich, rewarding collections of poetry, looking for commonalities so that I can do them some kind of justice in the allotted space. I see that Emma Neale glosses her title by quoting two poets who likened a poem to a machine. Don Paterson is deprecatory: a poem is “just a little machine for remembering itself”; while William Carlos Williams throws the possibilities wide open with another craftily small claim: “A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words”.