New Zealand New Writing Winter 2007
VUP, NZ$19.95 | Reviewed by Simon Sweetman

THE 35th issue of Sport is the first to be released after the career-to-date anthology, Great Sporting Moments 1988-2004. The Victoria University Press-issued collections of new prose and poetry writing were coming out twice a year up until 2003. And then, fifteen years in to the literary magazine’s career, the strain started to show. It’s now an annual affair.

So, Sport 35 is subtitled “New Zealand New Writing Winter 2007”. It features plenty of new up and coming writers and some old heads to anchor the fanciful flights of many burgeoning poets.

I get very bored with the standard New Zealand poem which, typically, is long on observation and short on actually saying anything. There are plenty of those in this issue of Sport; but then, there are plenty of those in almost every literary journal this country produces, not to mention the individual collections by almost all of our poets, included the raved-about and respected elders of the movement.

But, Sport 35 also has some gems. Emily Dobson’s slim volume from 2005 (A Box Of Bees) was a hypnotic, enchanting collection. Her small handful of offerings to this issue of Sport follow suit, but step away from the theme of her Bees cycle, showing she can do the observational thing without falling in to the trap of merely being flaky.

Similarly Ingrid Horrocks’ selection (Morning With My Grandmother) returns a very decent poet to her craft. Horrocks, having moved in to the travel/memoir realm with her Travelling With Augusta (2003), is to my mind a poet first and foremost. Here she follows on, thematically, but is back to the tight poetry writing she first made her name with (I really liked her Japanese-inspired poetry from about a decade ago; like Kapka Kassabova her poems seem inspired by the desire for constant travel and action from abroad).

Arini Beautrais (a writer I was unfamiliar with until reading this selection) really impressed me with Twenty Three Love Poems. There is no clever trick to the title of that selection, it is literally twenty-three short love poems – and they’re often quirky and inventive, playing with the form, as well as offering some touching moments, if a little left of centre (an ode to a gay man in Love Poem For A Queer Boy ends “May you be happy tomorrow./May your tummy rest/in the small of a beautiful back”). This is far more rewarding for me as a reader than hearing about our cracked coastline, or the affect of The Lord Of The Rings being filmed here in Godzone. Yawn!

Sarah Laing, who won the 2006 Sunday Star Times short story competition, backs up her efforts there with the story Notes On Etiquette. Her forthcoming collection, Coming Up Roses, should be great. She has the necessary keen eye – but she actually has a point to her musings.

Mid-way through this 200-page volume the wheels feel like they are about to come off. It’s all very charming, but relatively pointless. And then the old heads appear, to steer us back on course. Predictable poems from CK Stead and Elizabeth Smither are far from awful of course, but also far from their respective best work. Ditto for the entries by Tony Beyer and Fiona Farrell.

I enjoyed Therese Lloyd’s poems, seeing her progress from an earnest performance-poet in to a young writer whose work really benefits from being on the page as much as it does when gleaming from the stage has been great. Her poem Up was the single highlight of Sport 35 for me. Apart from that it is business as usual. So buy this to support New Zealand writers. But it’s remarkably safe, far from exploratory and experimental, and though immaculately crafted, the work all seems to suffer (apart from a handful of notable selections) from a grey sameness that tends to come from the writers working at something they think might get published, rather than writing what they feel and think and know. Or so I reckon.