Book Review: There’s No Place Like The Internet in Springtime, by Erik Kennedy

Available in bookshops nationwide. Shortlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. 

Poets like to say that content is form and form is content. It gets said enough to be true, but reading Erik Kennedy’s There’s No Place Like the Internet in Springtime reminded me that to the average reader (and I’m not sure how many are left given that we go around declaring nuggets like the one above) – the average reader will find a difference between poetic craft and poetic content. They will respond to them differently. Poetic content is more personal – it’s going to be harder to respond to in a neutral, analytical way. Form on the other hand comes with guidelines. So let’s start there.

It’s indeed where Kennedy starts – his title and first poem in the collection is undoubtedly a sonnet. Its fourteen lines follow a slant petrarchan rhyme scheme and begin with a grandiose private contemplation of nature before a sudden turn in the eighth line ‘Wait, am I thinking of the internet? / Oh, maybe not, but what I’m thinking of / is desperate and very, very like it.’ I think form is where Kennedy likes to play. In an interview with his publisher about this Kennedy replied, ‘there’s nothing like conquering a form. Every time I complete a poem that obeys rules I feel like Edmund Hillary.’

Kennedy’s collection is a finalist in the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry in the 2019 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards and his attention to form and rhyme may be a big reason why.

The risk in Kennedy collection lies here: in the reader feeling belittled. His irony could be read as condescension; his satire as mocking. In the poem Double Saw Final at the Canterbury A&P Show, for example, the poet’s eye could be read as ridicule; the poem I’m Impressed as a poem which praises foolishness.

I don’t think this is Kennedy’s intention, but it can happens in poems where Kennedy appears pleased with his own detachment, a smug onlooker. When he becomes more involved in the poem, engages and relates to the content, it couples with his form to create memorable poems. In the poem Four Directions at the Beach, Kennedy makes you look differently at a classic New Zealand scene. The poem Remembering America is like a sad country and western heartbreaker song. The poem The School of Naps is like a self-examination.

I have a close friend who on first meeting I detested; it was because I misunderstood her. I was like that with There’s No Place Like the Internet in Springtime. When I began reading it I felt like Kennedy wanted to make fun of me. If you feel like that too go back and try again and look at everything he is doing in each poem; you might find something else there which leads you to become close friends.

Reviewed by Elizabeth Kirkby-McLeod

There’s No Place Like The Internet in Springtime
by Erik Kennedy
Published by VUP
ISBN 9781776561957

WORD: Coming Rain, by Stephen Daisley with Kate De Goldi

Coming Rain is the second and latest novel by New Zealand author, from Australia, Stephen Daisley. Kate De Goldi talked with him about his latest book, which won the Acorn Foundation Literary Award at the recent Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.

As De Goldi said, “Daisley lives in West Australia but is absolutely a Kiwi.” She started by outlining the key characters, an older man, Painter, and a younger man, Lou. The third main character is a Dingo bitch. Between these three runs tenderness and violence. The dingo is in pup and spends the story desperate for food and a safe place to whelp. The two men work together and the work is an important part of the narrative. Daisley read a long passage in which the men arrive at a shearing quarters and prepare food. As De Goldi points out, all the tools are named by their manufacturer which gives them a sense of importance in the story: a Green River skinning knife, a Kelly axe. It is probably the first in-depth description of actual work since the start of the 1900s.

De Goldi also commented on the prose where pronouns are often dropped which gives a fragmentary effect to the story. Daisley sees this as allowing the reader to become part of the narrative as they fill in the blanks with their own ideas. He creates “a new kind of music within the sentence”.

The influences of Irish and American writers like Faulkner and Steinbeck are important, but so too are Janet Frame and the New Zealand poets of her era. As Daisley quipped, he has a sign beside his computer which states,”Don’t show off, you bastard”.

Dingo is an important character in the story and one reader commented,”the best animal depiction since Watership Down.” Observing his own dogs helped in creating this close relationship with an animal which is so starkly portrayed.

The two men are formed by two wars and a depression. Daisley reflected at some length on how we are what has gone before. As Faulkner says,”there is no such thing as the past, we carry it with us”.

As a boy, Daisley wanted to write, but at 15 his mother suggested he would grow out of it. It took decades before his first book on Gallipolli, Traitor, was published, but the intervening years as soldier, shearer and farmer have seen him continue to write.

De Goldi had a perceptive understanding of Coming Rain, even surprising Stephen Daisley with her observations. It was a wonderful insight into the ideas behind the text and probably more so , to the person behind the story.

I look forward to more from this pen.

Reviewed by Kathy Watson

Coming Rain, by Stephen Daisley with Kate De Goldi

Coming Rain
by Stephen Daisley
Published by Text Publishing
ISBN 9781922182029