Böcker av Murray Edmond

In the tradition of James Joyce's Dubliners, Murray Edmond brings us Aucklanders, short stories that celebrate lives lived in New Zealand's biggest city. Through different time-settings, and narrative styles, the tales are variously entertaining, funny, satirical, reflective and tragic. Sometimes they are a little gruesome or absurd. Yet these Aucklanders often feel oddly familiar. Among them we encounter a scared RSA waiter, a Zen sensei who keeps his followers guessing, a shy boy who breaks a neighbour's hothouse with his shanghai slingshot, a famous drunken artist with a tortured legacy, and a delivery driver with a side hustle. The stories variously evoke the hopeful exuberance of youth and love, the pain of heartbreak and loss, and the ambient excitement of a high school play about to begin.

Walls to Kick and Hills to Sing From: A Comedy with Interruptions is a new poetry collection from Murray Edmond. Arranged in six acts, 'Exposition', 'Complication', 'Revelation', 'Peripety', 'Catastrophe' and 'Denouement', it merrily experiments with voice and performance, including, in various forms, monologues, dialogues, choruses, songs, scene sets and storyboards. Edmond writes that 'there isn't a poem which couldn't have been otherwise / than it is', and in his poems form is aptly married to content. Language plays a starring role - 'lobal glooming', 'mobile grooming', 'focal warping', 'glottal warbling' runs a poem on global warming. A consummate director, he arranges his dramatic and mock dramatic pieces with swagger and panache, but never without a glint of self-irony. The collection's surprises and surreal moments (a seal reciting R. A. K. Mason, a goat tied to the theatre door) are balanced with more serious lyric poems, of which the final section and superb, postcard-like 'Narrow Roads to the East' sequence are highlights. This diverse miscellany, which nevertheless has the coherence of a well-structured variety show, is a fine book - challenging, 'alerting', playful, profound. These poems take readers into complex sites where language and experience meet.

Protest and revolution, beads and flowers, love not war: this anthology evokes an era and uncovers a period of creativity and talent. Organized chronologically, it foregrounds poems, not poets and includes essays by Brunton and Edmond.