Two disparate but equally potent aches.įrom an interview I did with David Eggleton last year: On page four you move from a matter-of-fact representation of the law to page five and the wife in Canton (‘you carry her bones in your body’).
#Ockham disparate terms how to#
How to find the co-ordinates of estrangement, of that which is unbearably lost and is hard to tally (family, home, what matters in life). Instead the poetic spareness, the drifting phantom voices give stronger presence to things that are much harder to put into words. Yes, there is detailed evidence of history but this is not a realist account, a story told in such a way. The collection harvests shifting forms, voices and tones that promote poetry as mood, state of mind, emotional residue. Mostly it is a matter of death (and casting back into life) whereby phantoms stalk and cry about what might have been and what is: ‘You spend your thoughts drowning in your family-/ missing from this vista- and contemplate a return with nothing to show/ for your absence.’ There are the unsettled imaginings of what it is to be home, to be at home and to be out of home to the extent that home becomes difficult and different. The poems draw upon and draw in notions of distance, defeat, guilt and forgiveness.
#Ockham disparate terms skin#
This is what gets under your skin as you read. Within the opening pages, the chilling event is situated in a wider context where laws proscribe the alienness that situates Chinese as outsiders. He takes an event from 1905 when Lionel Terry went hunting for a Chinaman in Haining Street, Wellington and ended up murdering Joe Kum Yung. He resides in Wellington, his home town.Ĭhris’s debut collection, How to Be Dead in a Year of Snakes, responds to a moment in history not so much by narrating that history but by installing a chorus of voices. How to Be Dead in a Year of Snakes Chris Tse, Auckland University PressĬhris Tse is a writer, musician and actor whose poetry first appeared in AUP New Posts 4 (Auckland University Press, 2011). I am heading off to Wellington this morning to go to A Circle of Laureates, the Lauris Edmond prize event and do a smidgeon of reading in between.
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