John Adams - Steele Roberts - $29.99
Review by Siobhan Harvey
2011 New
Zealand Society of Authors Jessie Mackay Award for Best First Poetry Collection
winner, John Adams shifts his focus from verse to short fiction in his new
book, The Elbow Stories. 11 works are
collected here, a range – of subjects, protagonists and language – which
showcase Adams’ talents for succinctness, poetic expression and finely crafted
detailed in his new chosen form.
In the opening offering, egotistical
surgeon, Jermyn Staines’ ethical judgment is influenced by a series of
blood-stained dreams. In ‘Fishbowl’, a group of regulars at a holiday park
treat newcomers Sweetie, Cowboy and their sons with the kind of animosity that
speaks volumes (to many outsiders, migrants….) about the full implications of
the mateship upon which modern New Zealand society is predicated. In ‘Where the
Elbow Points’, the works of famed New Zealand poet, Robyn Hyde and famed US
poet, William Carlos Williams influence the interactions and output of a rural
poetry group. Here and elsewhere a subtext of remoteness and isolation inform Adams’
stories. It’s a seclusion of people detached from one another (family members;
villages in country communities…) as much as the separation of place
(landscape, home….), as the opening of the tongue-in-cheek work ‘The Moon’s
Smile’:
“Autumn showers
had given way to an unexpected dry spell. Under a bare sky, early dusk
robbed the
suburb of colour. Familiar shapes loomed black, white and moon-washed blue.
My car had
brought me through the last bend into the final stretch, where defoliated plane
trees lined the margins of the street…”
What follows is a tale of a writer
named John, a gathering with his wife and her friend, and a discussion about
the crux of the word elbow, lightly
used but integral to unlocking the meaning of a new story the fictional author
has penned. Tongue in cheek? Serious inter-textuality? Or the key to divining
Adams’ wider work here, as well as an author who’s happy to construct
narratives around a fictional doppelganger? You decide. Irrespective, these
queries summarize the complexities and inventiveness evident in The Elbow Stories, as indeed in they did
in Adams’ poetry collection, Briefcase.
Along the way, as the above quote illustrates there’s
something sumptuous about the use of language, the colour Adams’ brings to his
descriptions, the vividness he brings to his characters. These matters are
nowhere more apparent than in the Indian family constricted by tradition in
contemporary Awahaere Adams astutely fleshes out in ‘Second Marriage’ and
teenage Jackie, unwitting holder of her families conflicting legal secrets in
‘From the Cellar’. Towards the close of the collection, the author returns us
to these characters in the stories ‘Lines of Engagement’ and ‘Below the Hedge’,
deepening their relationships with each other and with us the reader, and
extending out the significant subject matters each dual-narrative raises:
familial loyalty; cross-cultural romance; modern independence versus bygone
tradition; the roles of gender politics in our everyday existences.
With these intersections of narrative, the evocative
language, the vibrant, quirky dramatis personae and the deft weight assigned to
frequencies (words such as ‘elbow’, places such as Awahaere) The Elbow Stories is a promising debut
story collection by a writer who, on the strength of this book and his first
poetry collection, suggests much potential.
About the
reviewer
Siobhan Harvey is the author
of the poetry collection, Lost Relatives (Steele Roberts NZ, 2011), the
book of literary interviews Words Chosen Carefully: New Zealand Writers in
Discussion (Cape Catley, 2010) and the poetry anthology Our Own Kind: 100
New Zealand Poems about Animals (Random House, 2009). Recently, her poetry
has been published in Evergreen Review (Grove Press, US), Meanjin
(Aus), Penduline Press – The New Zealand Issue (US), Snorkel
(Aus) and Structo (UK). She’s Poetry Editor of Takahe and
coordinates New Zealand's National Poetry Day. She was runner up in 2012 Dorothy
Porter Prize for Poetry (Aus), 2012 Kevin Ireland Poetry Prize, 2011 Landfall
Essay Prize and 2011 Kathleen Grattan Award for a Sequence of Poems, and
shortlisted for the 2012 Jane Frame Memorial Award for Literature. A Poet’s Page
containing a selection of her recorded work and texts can be found on The Poetry
Archive (U.K.), directed by Sir Andrew Motion.
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