With the publication of ‘Map of the Invisible World’, and the recent death of Robert McNamara, MATT MCGREGOR revisits Tash Aw’s 2005 novel ‘The Harmony Silk Factory’.

I FINISHED Tash Aw’s 2005 novel The Harmony Silk Factory, set in Malaysia in 1940, to the news of Robert McNamara’s death. As Kennedy’s Secretary of Defence, people will rightly remember – and judge – McNamara as one of the principal architects of the war in Vietnam. But, as Errol Morris’s The Fog of War reminds us, McNamara’s involvement in American war crimes predates Vietnam by two decades, with his position as a statistician during World War Two. In The Fog of War, McNamara describes his work in improving the efficiency of the American bombing-raids over Japan’s wooden cities. The film portrays, along with McNamara’s later regrets, his technocratic certainties and absolutes, his statistics of maximum casualties, his systematic and ultimately terrifying mind.

ALEXANDER BISLEY looks back on Auckland’s superlative literary event.

THE Auckland Writers and Readers Festival is, three-in-a-row, a terrific literary festival. It raises an exciting challenge for Wellington’s festival. Richard Holloway was my unexpected delight for 2009. The former Bishop of Edinburgh and current chair of the Scottish Arts Council (“a sort of Bishop to the Arts”) is the ideal intellectual: profoundly humanistic and soulful, a formidable presence with a swashbuckling Scottish wit. In discussion with Glynn Cardy, the author of Between the Monster and the Saint and Looking in the Distance: the Human Search for Meaning scintillated. He criticised the Anglicans, his former church, for their attitude towards homosexuality. “These endless, tedious arguments about gay sexuality.” He said it was perverse to tell young people that their love, a beautiful thing, was wrong. He recalled how Bobby Kennedy, a too often callous/opportunistic politician, became spiritual. “That summer [before the assassination] soul entered Kennedy.” On bigoted African bishops? “It’s history’s revenge.” Holloway eloquently spoke of imaginative compassion: “Identify with the humanity of the other.”

SAPNA SAMANT recently caught up with Mohammed Hanif, author of ‘A Case of Exploding Mangoes’, following the Auckland Writers & Readers Festival in May.

IT WAS TOWARDS the end of the interview that I thanked Mohammed Hanif for not writing a book that had the smell of spices. “What do you mean?”, he said. You know the books that Indian writers of English do so well. Ancient mansions in villages, landlords and upper caste types, grandmother crushing spices with her mortar and pestle, dabbing her tears with the corner of her crushed silk saree pallu, the smell of spices pervading the olfactory senses of the reader...that stuff. “Oh, I would love to read this book,” he declared. He was taking the piss. Exactly like in A Case of Exploding Mangoes. I could not stop laughing from the moment I started it. The era of Zia-Ul-Haq in Pakistan and how he forever changed the face of this subcontinental nation by imposing Sharia and other Islamic laws. God, sorry, Allah spoke to Zia much before he changed his avatar for George W. But if every word in the book formed an image, then it was dark and depressing because those years changed the world. Those years of covert U.S. operations in Pakistan, backing mujahideen, the Pakistani army and a man called Osama Bin Laden. Of course I had to tell him how much I enjoyed it. Imagine comparing Nancy Reagan’s face to an old cat’s arse! Or the imagery of Mrs Zia’s massive buttocks quivering as she turned in her sleep! “You remember all the naughty bits don’t you?”, Hanif said. Well yes, if the metaphors are so original and wild.

Originally published in 1969, recent Nobel Prize Laureate J.M.G. Le Clezio’s novel ‘The Book of Flights’ has been re-released. By MATT MCGREGOR.

APPARENTLY it’s now possible, forty years after the first release of The Book of Flights (Random House, $29.99), to see experimental fiction, like Marxism, feminism, political protests and disco, as a mildly embarrassing historical quirk. That, at least, was the angle taken by journalists after the French novelist J.M.G Le Clezio won the Nobel Prize for Literature last year. Like American writers William Gaddis and Thomas Pynchon, Le Clezio become known in the sixties and seventies for writing so-called impossible fictions: the plot-less, character-less, non-serious, self-referential iconoclastic frame-breakers that tended to make unwary readers hiff their editions across the room. In the late 1970s, however, Le Clezio’s style shifted. He started writing in an increasingly linear, referential style; and like Woody Allen’s “early, funny ones,” French readers seemed to prefer these recent, clearly plotted novels. Before he won the Nobel Prize it seemed like these works might be his legacy.

By C.K. Stead
AUP, $59.99 | Reviewed by Sarah Jane Barnett

‘I HAVE tried, on the whole, to represent my own history as it occurred, and not make it look better, or myself wiser, more mature, more adroit, than I was at the time.’

C.K.(Christian Karlson) Stead was born in Auckland in 1932 and is considered by many to be New Zealand’s greatest living poet. A student of Allen Curnow and Frank Sargeson, he has published fourteen collections of poetry, eleven novels, seven books of literary criticism, two collections of short stories and edited a number of other collections. He has won many literary prizes, honours and fellowships, including the Creative New Zealand Michael King Writers’ Fellowship in 2005, during which he created this collection. Collected Poems 1951-2006 brings together his published poetry as well as 22 previously uncollected poems. A thick hard-backed volume, it comes in at just over 500 pages including a foreword and extensive notes and annotations written by Stead.

By Ian Wedde
VUP, $30 | Reviewed by Jolene Williams

WESTERNERS often feel surprised, curious and intensely confused after their first encounter with Chinese opera. And so, after reading only the back cover of Ian Wedde’s novel Chinese Opera, it was apt that my sensitivities were equally awry. The blurb promised big things. Strange things. Things that would test boundaries of expectation. Like its musical equivalent, Chinese Opera proved suited for a very specific, very flexible, readership.

Issue Two: Stakeout
NZ$5.95 | Reviewed by Christine Linnell

‘STAKEOUT’ is the second issue of newcomer Hue & Cry, and from the very start, the journal seems designed to pull you in. The vaguely threatening scrutiny of the title, the issue number reflected and re-reflected across the cover, the wide margins and bold black-and-white of the layout – all of it suggests a kind of mirror, an invitation to project your own identity onto the pages.

ALEXANDER BISLEY takes a sneak peek at this year’s Auckland Writers & Readers Festival.

AS A STAUNCH Wellingtonian, I hate to admit that Auckland has a better literary Festival, but there’s just no denying it. 2009 sees an impressive tight five lead the pack. “In those hands, everything seems like politics, and politics has never seemed more interesting.” Hendrik Hertzberg is one of the great political journalists. Currently at The New Yorker, he writes gorgeously and definitively nails issues, such as McCain-Palin’s “Socialist” slurs against Obama (newyorker.com/... /taco_talk_hertzberg). Stefan Aust is another godfather of political insight. The former Der Spiegel editor-in-chief cut his teeth investigating German terrorism, resulting in the landmark 1985 book The Baader Meinhof Complex. Rhonda Sherman is founding director of the intimidatingly good New Yorker Festival, the razor edge of cultural movers and shakers (festival.newyorker.com). Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie spearheads the African New Wave. Nigeria-raised, Baltimore-educated, the atmospheric author of Purple Hibiscus, Half of a Yellow Sun and The Thing Around Your Neck shows much promise. And there’s much more to former Dom cub Kirsty Gunn than the sensual, devastating short story Rain, you know.

By Elizabeth Knox
VUP, NZ$35 | Reviewed by Christine Linnell

FOR ME, reading New Zealand literature is as much a therapy for culture shock as anything else. I moved here from America two years ago, and since then I’ve been looking for local writers – particularly women writers – who can help me figure out what I’ve signed up for. Last winter’s project, predictably, was Katherine Mansfield. This summer it was Elizabeth Knox.

Edited by Stu Bagby
AUP, $27.95 | Reviewed by Joan Fleming

I REMEMBER, last year, spontaneously reciting James K Baxter’s ‘On the Death of her Body’ to a group of East Porirua boys who were drinking at the next table at Havana. It’s a gorgeous poem about that most classic and inexhaustible of themes – sex versus death – and it’s always lodged with me. Its music, its grandness, its sense of feeling your limbs and pulsings most keenly when you’re whistling at the edge of infinity – I guess I’d had a few beers by that point, but some openness in these kids at the next table made it easy to move from small talk to reciting Baxter at 2am. After stumbling on the first stanza and having to start all over again, I managed to speak the whole poem aloud, with all my might, with my eyes closed, and when I finished, and looked up, the boys were totally rapt. Their eyes were wet. I’m not kidding. It was a goddam moment. And if sex is the way to get people to listen to poetry, well, hallelujah, so be it.

Edited by Rebecca Priestley;
Simon Nathan and Mary Varnham
Awa Press, $48/$25 | Reviewed by Andy Palmer

REBECCA PRIESTLEY’s recent publication Atoms, Dinosaurs & DNA was a history of New Zealand science and scientists ostensibly for the younger reader. The Awa Book of New Zealand Science came out about the same time and is a companion piece ostensibly for the older reader. Although it’s fair to say that both would be enjoyed by anyone with an interest in science, regardless of age.

By Amy Brown
VUP, NZ$25 | Reviewed by Tom Fitzsimons

FULL DISCLOSURE: Amy Brown took Victoria University’s MA in Creative Writing the same year that I did. She is also a past Lumière books editor and the website’s current creative writing editor.

Regardless of all of that, here she comes with an altogether impressive and distinctive debut collection of poems. Always supremely polished whenever I’ve heard them aloud, Brown’s poems seem even more measured and certain now they’re gathered together on the page.

By Tim Jones
Random House, $27.95 | Reviewed by Jennifer van Beynen

SHORT STORIES are tough. Tough to write and, at times, tough to read. And in a collection of short stories, how should they fall together into one book? Should there be links, an overriding theme? The short story can be seen as a small universe unto itself – a good short story should bring the reader straight into this universe and keep them there, absorbed, until the end. It seems that a collection of these universes should then make a whole. In Transported, Tim Jones tackles climate change, fantasy, science fiction (I assume if one story has orcs and another aliens, both bases are covered), some small pieces involving Borges, Gorbachev, and of course human relationships. This means a lot of angles in one short story collection, and at times the material doesn’t sit together all that well.

By J J Joseph
Exisle Publishing, $35 | Reviewed by Christine Linnell

AT THE beginning of Fighting for My Life: The Confession of a Violent Offender, J J Joseph writes, “I hope my story takes you out of your world and into mine for a day or so”. This insight is the main strength of a Waikato man’s memoir about domestic abuse.

By Roddy Doyle
Vintage, $26.95 | Reviewed by Jodie Mullish

RODDY DOYLE’s 1997 novel The Woman Who Walked into Doors was a worldwide success. A hit. A smash. Call it what you will, it invaded the literary scene with the same violence that Doyle’s character Charlo Spencer used to thump, kick, and rape his wife Paula. In that book, alcoholic Paula is recently widowed, and looks back on her pitiable life in the hands of the thuggish, dangerous Charlo; the searing emotional and physical abuse she suffered at his hands ensure she feels she’s nothing more than vessel for hate and shame.

Great novelist David Foster Wallace died of apparent suicide on September 12. CARL SHUKER, reviewer and author of ‘The Method Actors’ and ‘The Lazy Boys’, pens a tribute.

I WAS one of the lucky ones who discovered Infinite Jest in 1996, the year it was published and before it developed its really hardcore reputation and ability to inspire a grimace or platitude in the unread by its very mention. Someone had a subscription to TIME and an overheated, both condescending and admiring piece therein (the fence-sitting of reviewers without time or word count to get something that important and that big under their belts [cf. Jack Green’s “Fire the Bastards!” on the first critics of Gaddis’ The Recognitions]) along with a picture of a young unshaven David Foster Wallace in bandanna and white turtleneck did it for me. I was only 22. In a used bookstore in Christchurch (Smith’s, anyone?) I found IJ dustjacketless for six dollars; a pretty good buy – a dollar a month for the time I spent reading and re-reading it to the exclusion of all else while on the nightshift doing laundry at St. George’s Hospital. To the exclusion of the actual job as well – parts of the book are coloured with the sounds of the buzzers of untended three-ton washing machines at the ends of their cycles; coloured too with memories of falsifying the wash logs, memories of finding pieces of umbilical cord cooked in the near-boiling water, and coloured too with a red, semitransparent, gelatinous, congealed material I found repeatedly and stared at raptly and nicknamed “people jelly”. I mention this stuff only because discovering this writer changes the time in which you discover him like a first love affair changes utterly a new city. I have read everything he wrote. A dollar a month for the avalanche, for the hair blown back. For being moved to tears and for cracking up laughing aloud, cackling at a page, page after page. For laughter; for sadness; for wonder. Dollar a month for wisdom. For a kind of education. For curiosity. Dollar a month for the knowledge that the novel can still do anything.

By Veronika Meduna and Rebecca Priestly
Random House, $34.99 | Reviewed by Andy Palmer

Atoms, Dinosaurs & DNA is a frustrating book, even if it achieves its purpose: to inform the reader about prominent New Zealand scientists from the last two centuries. Each scientist is afforded a double page, a brief biography, and discussion of their major work/influence, with a few nice illustrations.

By Sue Orr
Random House, NZ$29.95 | Reviewed by Sarah Jane Barnett

The bookkeeper’s wife wanted to host a dinner party. It would not be too large an affair – six guests at the most, she suggested – a small gathering to break the monotony of long winter evenings.

Sue Orr’s debut book of short stories will certainly break the monotony of a long winter evening. For the last couple of years I have had a sneaking feeling that short stories will become the ‘next big thing’ in New Zealand literature. I don’t know if this thought was prompted by the conception of the Six Pack or just because recently I have had the serendipity of reading some great books of short stories. But I think their bite-sized morsels of fiction fit neatly into the ‘empty time’ public transport creates in our lives. Etiquette for a Dinner Party stands out on the shelf. Its delicious cover hints at the contents inside: black and glossy with three formally-dressed gentlemen at a dinner table, plus snake. The book itself feels soft and pliable in the hand. With Orr’s history as a journalist, editor, speechwriter and Manhire graduate, I was interested to see what gems of social graces and etiquette she had woven into her characters and plots.

By Charles Bock
John Murray, NZ$39 | Reviewed by Sam Gaskin

CHARLES BOCK’s debut novel Beautiful Children follows the misfortunes of runaways and parents, sex peddlers and cartoonists, all damned and decomposing at different rates in the author’s home town. Welcome to fabulous Las Vegas.

Bock’s depiction of Vegas probably isn’t endorsed by the city’s tourism board. Over the course of one evening – the night 12-year-old Newell goes missing – we’re introduced to Daphne, a ketamine addict with a pregnant belly “the colour of uncooked bird”; a callous porn actor who injects something to harden his oversized cock; and a tragically suggestible stripper named Cheri Blossom who has flammable tits, “the dyed stubs of red wax and tiny red wicks … packed into her surgically hollowed-out nipple casings.”

By Charlotte Simmonds
VUP, NZ$25 | Reviewed by Sarah Jane Barnett

THE OPENING page of The World’s Fastest Flower tells me the Canadian Bunchberry Dogwood opens in 0.4 milliseconds and, because of its speed, has only been discovered since technology managed to catch up with nature. It would be easy to read Simmond's book with the same haste. The ninety pages are filled with lyric poems that build racing and addictive narratives. There are no sections to this book, no breaks or breathers for the reader and I wonder, if I ever have dinner with the author, if the evening would be spent in silent but rapt attention.

ALEXANDER BISLEY looks back on the Auckland Writers & Readers Festival in May.

I WAS inspired by the Auckland Writers & Readers Festival; and not just by the courage, wit and grace of blind Canadian poet-memoirist Ryan Knighton (Cockeyed). He made my nebuliser-suckling hospitalisation, which messed with my Festival and my journalistic duty (after getting me a yellow card from splendifirous Japan a couple of days early), seem trivial.

ALEXANDER BISLEY peeks beneath the covers of the Christchurch Writers Festival, from September 4.

NOT ONLY is Auckland inspiringly challenging Wellington’s Writers’ Festival, now Christchurch is having a go, too. The big draw is legendary war correspondent Robert Fisk (who will also appear at an Amnesty International event in Wellington). I interviewed this appealing tsunami of a man, synonymous with writing and fighting savvy, during his first visit to Wellington in 2006. “I think film has an unstoppable power to convince if it’s properly made. When I was at school I wanted to be a film critic,” he enthused.

Edited by Jean Anderson
VUP, NZ$30 | Reviewed by Amy Brown

THIS COLLECTION marked the opening of the New Zealand Centre for Literary Translation at Victoria University in March. It gathers together, in alphabetical order according to their country of origin, 21 diverse stories and excerpts from novels, most of which are previously unpublished in English. Acting as a showcase for some of the lecturers in Victoria’s language schools, Been There, Read That! is a good way to sample recent, and in many cases unfamiliar, writing from 21 different countries.

By Chris Orsman
AUP, NZ$24.95 | Reviewed by L M Wallace

THE TITLE sequence of the book The Lakes of Mars begins with a quote from Stephen Pyne’s The Ice: A Journey to Antarctica. “The microbiosphere of Antarctica has more in common with Mars than with Earth”, and it is on this premise that Chris Orsman invites the reader into the unfamiliar landscape the collection meditates on.

By Emily Perkins
Bloomsbury, NZ$35 | Reviewed by Amy Brown

TOM, a screenwriter and solo father in his early-forties, cannot stop thinking about his dead wife. With an honest, imperfect passion, he writes a novel about Ann, organising his memories and speculations of their time together. With the gradual revelation of how and why Ann died, Tom appears to make peace with his situation and Emily Perkins ensures that her fourth book is both suspenseful and emotionally complex.

By Bridget van der Zijpp
VUP, NZ$30 | Reviewed by Jennifer Van Beynen

THE SET-UP of Misconduct could be the making of a dream chick-lit book – a likeable heroine, the moody but charismatic boyfriend who left her for the neighbour, followed by our heroine going to extremes and burning said ex’s car, among other things. This could be a decent 100-page, emotionally shallow, drama-driven paperback complete with a sugary pink cover. However, in the entirely capable hands of Bridget van der Zijpp, such material gets entirely different treatment. Rather than fleshing out the above drama over the whole book, van der Zijpp sets her Misconduct after the initial drama of protagonist Simone losing her boyfriend, in the aftermath so to speak. At this point Simone is recovering from losing the boyfriend, job, driver’s licence and hefty blows to her self-esteem that come with it all. The book is set up nicely when a friend gives her the offer to housesit for an ailing relative in hospital, leaving Simone in a haphazard, craft- and doll-filled house near the sea. Throughout the book, she gets to know the locals, the beach and, hopefully, herself.

TOM FITZSIMONS scans the stellar programme of this year’s Auckland Writers & Readers Festival.

THIS IS my first Auckland Writers & Readers Festival and the organisers have kindly landed a huge haul for the occasion. Some truly big overseas names here – and a good scattering of locals too. Five who I’ll definitely be seeing:

By Luke Davies
Allen & Unwin, NZ$38 | Reviewed by Amy Brown

LUKE DAVIES, one of Australia’s favourite poets, novelists and now screenwriters, does an excellent job of characterising Howard Hughes, America’s favourite obsessive-compulsive aviator, in his latest novel, God of Speed. Even if you haven’t seen Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator, you may be familiar with Howard Hughes from the episode of The Simpsons in which Mr Burns has an aeroplane called the Spruce Moose, and locks himself away, growing a long beard and fingernails.

Various Authors/Illustrators
Lopdell/Random House | Reviewed by Andy Palmer

REVIEWING children’s books is unusual for me. I don’t have kids of my own, and I can’t pretend to be down with what the kids are into. Nor can I really claim to know what makes a good kids book. Reading some of these books, I couldn’t help but have my sensible, logical adult brain get in the way of fully accepting the story or wondering how children would react to them. No doubt some kids will like them and some won’t. I do, however, have some children’s books in my library because I like them as books, as stories. And I really like some of these.

By Annie Villiers and John Z Robinson
Longacre Press, NZ$30 | Reviewed by Sarah Jane Barnett

THE OTAGO Rail Trail is the first New Zealand rail trail to be dedicated to cyclists and walkers. Its 150km length cuts through some of the most memorable scenery in New Zealand, a landscape that is already well represented in art and literature.

By Eion Stevens; introduction by David Eggleton
Longacre Press, NZ$35 | Reviewed by Sarah Jane Barnett

EION STEVENS’ paintings are like visual summaries of an emotion or an event, where the guts of the matter is left for the viewer to create. His tragic and comedic figures depict a staged inner-life, his visual choices symbolise anti-heroes, and parody famous people or himself. The viewer is given a tantalising snapshot that is as likely to be ironic as it is tender. Enough about his work though, let’s talk about this book that combines poetry with painting – published to coincide with an exhibition at Dunedin Art Gallery – and why you might like it.

By Joe Dunthorne
Penguin, NZ$37 | Reviewed by Amy Brown

SOMEWHERE between Salinger’s Holden Caulfield and Will, in Nick Hornby’s About a Boy, comes Oliver Tate, a Welsh, 15-year-old only child, long on vocabulary and short on charm. No, that’s not quite right; Oliver’s blend of selfishness, lust, academic ability, vanity and confusion amounts to the sort of charm often present in the protagonist of a bildungsroman. Joyce’s Stephen Daedalus had it, and so did Alice Munro’s Del Jordan, but the fact they don’t exist in our contemporary world of Google, iPods, therapists and vegetarian sandals, somehow makes them more likeable.

NZ Arts Festival, Writers & Readers Week
March 15 | Reviewed by Sarah Jane Barnett

BRING to mind Basil Fawlty goose-stepping through his hotel’s dining room as his German guests eat dinner, after issuing his staff with the order, “Don’t mention the war!” he cannot restrain his own verbal and physical blunders.

NZ Arts Festival, Writers & Readers Week
March 16 | Reviewed by Joan Fleming

ILLICIT attractions, gay Catholics, rapists, whores, heroin, the letter E: the Legitimate Dangers session at Writers and Readers Week featured a group of novelists, historians and poets who are good at being bad. This handful of rule-breakers talked about getting knee-deep in the muck, whether it be muddy social taboos or sticky linguistic prohibitions. Sound poet Christian Bök defined his own motivations to break the rules by lamenting, “These days, it’s impossible to write a poem that would cause a riot. I think that’s a shame.”

By Duncan Fallowell
Profile Books, NZ$35 | Reviewed by Amy Brown

GOOD TRAVEL writing includes both autobiography and review. Before properly judging observations, you have to know something about the observer. Having finished Going as far as I can, I feel like I know Duncan Fallowell quite well. He is an educated, wealthy, gay Londoner. He can talk about Henry James, Hutch, architecture, wine and religion. He will share his doggerel verse, his racial generalisations and details of his sexual encounters without inhibition. He is polite, but not prudish; louche, but not sleazy; an aesthete and a hedonist, but not exactly a snob. At least, this is how he came across, to me, in his account of his journey through our country.

NZ Arts Festival, Writers & Readers Week
March 15 | Reviewed by Gemma Freeman

FOR WHAT IS possibly the most valuable prize for emerging writers in the world, and definitely the largest literary prize in New Zealand, the Embassy Theatre was embarassingly empty on Saturday evening as we gathered to hear readings by the nominees for the biennial $65,000 Prize in Modern Letters. If you subtract family and friends of each of the six nominees, that only leaves a handful of people there with an unbiased interest in upcoming New Zealand literature. Having seen the theatre completely packed throughout the week, it concerned me that this exclusively New Zealand line-up was not as appealing as other events. The group’s relative inexperience certainly did not mean a lack of quality: these six have had nothing less than glowing reviews, and the Prize hardly has a history of awarding duds (past winners are Catherine Chidgey, Glenn Colquhoun and Carl Shuker).

By Fiona Kidman
Random House, NZ$35 | Reviewed by Anne Brown

IN A NZ Listener interview with Dame Fiona Kidman in 2005, Denis Welch concluded by asking her whether there would be a sequel to her Montana Book Award-winning novel, The Captive Wife. Kidman replied that she felt at her age she didn’t have the time left to do the research involved in another historical novel.

NZ Arts Festival, Writers & Readers Week
March 14 | Reviewed by Joan Fleming

“HE BEGAN as a prodigy, and went on to become a virtuoso.” In the world of poetry, Paul Muldoon is about as close as you can get to a superstar. Poetry editor of the New Yorker, winner of countless honours and awards, and (it’s been said) owner of the most electric guitars of any major poet, Muldoon’s stage presence is practiced and easy. Yet he’s humble, gracious, gentle – and seems like a genuinely nice guy.

By Angela Andrews
VUP, NZ$25 | Reviewed by Andy Armitage

Echolocation is an apt title for Angela Andrew’s impressive first book in that her quiet poems demand patient attention to detect their deeply held resonances. These modest poems reward re-reading and soon reverberate outside their specificity.

Edited by Siobhan Harvey
JAAM Publishing Collective, $16 | Reviewed by Amy Brown

LITERARY journals often have a title or tagline, such as “new New Zealand writing”, “the garden party” or “open house”, which suggests a cohering theme for the collection. JAAM 25 doesn’t use this device. In the introduction, Siobhan Harvey, the editor, lets quotations from Novalis and Charles Simic help her reach a loose definition of what poetry (and, indeed, fiction) might be. Novalis says, “Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason”, and Simic calls it “an orphan of silence”. Much of the work Harvey has chosen for this collection could be seen to fall under these rather poetic definitions.