Tag: book review

Wellington Blogger Offers Modest Giveaway!

Posted on

I covered several reviews of my poetry collection All Blacks’ Kitchen Gardens in a recent post. Another review has since appeared, in Issue 63 of the Christchurch-based literary journal Takahe. In his review, James Norcliffe looks in detail at the three sections of the book – Inside, Outside and Farside – and concludes that:

All Blacks’ Kitchen Gardens is a most enjoyable read, full of intelligent poems intelligently arranged so that they set up echoes and conversations. Although at times there is the slight clunk of contrivance, there is more than enough here to surprise and satisfy.

Slight clunks apart, I’m pretty satisfied with this as a summary.

There’s a lot to like about Takahe. It’s a handsomely-produced magazine, featuring striking, full-colour front and back covers with artwork by Phil Price; it contains an extensive reviews section, the centrepiece of which is a long review of the latest collection by Stephen Oliver, Harmonic; and it is full of high-quality fiction and poetry.

I have a couple of poems in this issue, and the editors kindly sent me two contributors’ copies. I’m offering one of those copies free to a good home. If you’d like a copy of Takahe 63, please email me at timjones (at) actrix.co.nz with your postal address. I’ll send a copy to the first person who responds, and post a note here when I’ve done that. UPDATE: We have a winner – thanks for getting in touch, Rod Scown!

You can buy books by Tim Jones online!

Book Review: Mark Pirie, Slips (ESAW, 2008)

Posted on

I discovered cricket in 1969. At the time, we lived in Otatara, south of Invercargill. The only access I had to test cricket (for the uninitiated, this means five-day games between nations) was via radio: 4YC out of Dunedin were broadcasting commentaries on that summer’s tests between New Zealand and the West Indies. It wasn’t a powerful station, and the only way I could get reception in our house was to put my radio on top of the metal toilet cistern, which amplified the signal. (It’s possible this was inconvenient to other occupants of the house.)

Cricket is an old game which has developed a massive literature: not just the primary literature of statistics and match reports, but a secondary literature of fiction, poetry and plays. Mark Pirie has recently made a welcome addition to this literature with Slips, which is No. 21 in the Earl of Seacliff Art Workshop’s excellent mini-series of poem booklets. Slips is dedicated to Harry Ricketts, another cricketing poet (and biographer), thus acknowledging its place in this literary tradition.

Mark knows whereof he speaks. My cricketing days are well past me, but my son played junior cricket up to the 2006/07 season, and several times, just as his team were packing up for the day, Mark would turn up with his senior team. The cover of Slips shows Mark poised to take a slips catch (again, for US readers, the slips are like extra shortstops who stand behind the batter and take catches off what in baseball would be fouls).

All the poems inside are about, or at least allude to, cricket. These allusions range from the glancing to the highly statistical: “Legacies and Cold Stats” and “Fiery Fred” would delight any cricket historian, while the longest poem, “11 Ways of Being Dismissed”, is based on a Cricinfo article about eleven unusual dismissals.

My two favourite poems in the book aren’t so stats-heavy. “Brown’s Bay” is a beautiful love lyric, while “The Pavilion”, following a long literary tradition, uses cricket as a metaphor for life.

This book displays many of the virtues of Mark Pirie’s poetry: humour, moving writing about grief and loss, and some classic last lines. I particularly like the final line of “Joe”, about a gentleman who starts distracting the scorer:

I watch his words aeroplane up and down his breath.

Whether or not you know your doosra from your googly, Slips is worth catching.

You can buy books by Tim Jones online!

Book Review: Gene Wolfe, Soldier of Sidon (Tor Books, 2007)

Posted on

Gene Wolfe’s Soldier of Sidon (2007), third book in a series that began with Soldier of the Mist (1986) and Soldier of Arete (1989), continues Wolfe’s saga of Latro, the Roman mercenary in the 5th century BC whose head wound means that he cannot recall his name or his past adventures from day to day. In compensation, he can see and talk with the many gods of the ancient world. Tony Keen’s thoughtful review of the novel at Strange Horizons gives the detail I will not go into here. I want to make two points:

First, Wolfe’s predominant narrative technique, in which all the necessary detail is revealed, but in such a way that you don’t realise its significance at the time it’s revealed, and have to pay close attention to be able to realise its significance in retrospect, is perfectly suited to the tale of a man who comes to each situation, character and crisis as fresh as the reader.

Second, that much as I admire Wolfe as a storyteller and stylist, Soldier of Sidon continues a feature of Wolfe’s work that I find less admirable: he writes about societies in which females are subject, and sometime violently subject, to males. He writes about these societies outstandingly well, and his female characters are distinct, engaging, and within the limits of their subjugation, strong; but I’d love to know whether Gene Wolfe could carry off a novel in which women didn’t start at a pronounced disadvantage.

You can buy books by Tim Jones online!

Book Review: Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Poems, edited by Alexander Coleman (Penguin, 2000)

Posted on

Jorge Luis Borges is best known in the English-speaking world as a writer of stories and essays, but it was as a poet that he first became known in his native Argentina. His Selected Poems gathers together translations of his poetry by a number of different highly talented hands. I opened it with some trepidation, wondering whether the poetry could possibly be as good as the fiction: I’m delighted to report that it is every bit as good.

The Selected Poems prints the Spanish original of each poem on the left and the English translation on the right. The translators have done a fine job of transporting Borges’ characteristic concerns and his clarity of expression from Spanish to English. Borges’ great interests – time, the infinite, doppelgangers, the mortal hazard posed by mirrors – are as omnipresent in the poetry as in the prose, but are expressed with even greater economy in the poetry, which swoops between the private and the universal with almost dizzying facility.

Borges’ work is at once funny and profound, tragic and comic, mired in dread and rife with beauty. In my opinion, Jorge Luis Borges was the greatest writer of the twentieth century.

Some Borges links

You can buy books by Tim Jones online!