Former leading New Zealand publisher and bookseller, and widely experienced judge of both the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Montana New Zealand Book Awards, talks about what he is currently reading, what impresses him and what doesn't, along with chat about the international English language book scene, and links to sites of interest to booklovers.
Tuesday, June 16, 2015
Poem of the week:
(Houdini in Karis) by Tua Forsström
In this piece from the Finnish-Swedish poet’s new collection, Houdini is an escape artist who longs for human connection
‘I can break out of all the strongboxes there have ever been’ … Harry Houdini stars in the poem (Houdini in Karis). Photograph: Associated Press
Tua Forsström's new collection, One Evening in October I Rowed Out on the Lake (translated by David McDuff), is a sequence that may be read as one silence-punctuated extended poem. Water, fishes, stars, glitter, dust, rain, wolves, hares: these are among theleitmotifs, and have literal and metaphorical resonance. The natural world intersects at every turn with the moral world, and is intrinsic to Forsström’s love poems and elegies. There are human characters, of course: an operatic Carmen; a “Girl in Yellow Boots”; someone called Vanessa; and, in this week’s poem, the escape artist Harry Houdini.
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