Book – Remember Me: Poems to Learn by Heart from Aotearoa New Zealand

Editor: Anne Kennedy
Publisher: Auckland University Press 2023
Reviewer: David W Marks KC*

1. This is not simply another anthology of New Zealand verse.
2. The editor, Anne Kennedy, is serious in her intention that you be able to memorise – nay recite – its memorable contents.
3. Many notable authors are represented, and even a few old standards.
4. Thus, there is an extract from “Home Thoughts”, by that pivotal, South Island figure, Denis Glover. Dismissing thoughts of England, Glover wrote:

I think of what may yet be seen
in Johnsonville or Geraldine.

5. He thus immortalised two South Island hamlets. The sentiment is also seen in Australian poetry, as we slipped the colonial apron-strings. Thus, Dorothea Mackellar’s “My Country” poses the same question, in Australia.
6. Naturally, Kennedy also gives us Glover’s best known: “Magpies”, which every schoolchild can recite in New Zealand. But more than half of Kennedy’s selections are new to me, even if the names of the poets are often familiar. There is a surprise at every turned page.
7. Anna Jackson’s “The Treehouse” is a smoothly-crafted, 14-line song of passion, originally from her 2003 collection Cattullus for Children.
8. The name of Jackson’s 2003 collection gave the clue, since this poem is finely-crafted to be read to children, but to have a wholly different significance for adults:

… as if we lie awake

In a treehouse, shining a torch
into the forest around us,

losing the beam
in the dark.

9. There are poems in te reo Māori, usually also rendered in English. Individual te reo words have bled into standard New Zealand English seamlessly, but translation remains necessary.
10. But the master Māori poet, Hone Tuwhare’s “Nocturne” was composed in English, his second language. That English version is given, with a translation into te reo by Selwyn Muru.
11. One way of reading this anthology is as a way of re-imagining how such a book might now be compiled in Australia. Are we at the point where Oodgeroo Noonuccal (Kath Walker) might be translated into Moondjan? The parallels of a “settler” society, and the consequences of “settlement”, cannot be ignored, though.
12. The quality of the poetry, selected for its memorability, shines through.
13. It is always possible to argue with what is not included in an anthology. I have pasted Elizabeth Morton’s “Storyteller” and Charles Brasch’s “Winter Anemones” in the back of this collection. That is everyone’s solution, instead of arguing the toss on selection.
14. This is a good, informative and modern collection of New Zealand verse, taking in favourites, and introducing newer poets.
15. The editor, Anne Kennedy, is a noted poet and novelist. Her first novel, The Last Days of the National Costume, a story set in the dog-days of the Mercury Power electricity outage in Auckland in 1998, was good enough to cause a difference between friends (one hates it, one loves it). Her latest collection of poems is The Sea Walks into a Wall, 2021.

*David is an Australian who keeps a close eye on our cousins across The Ditch.