BooksDecember 3, 2015

Books: The Best Books of 2015 According to a Panel of 10 Experts. Our Eighth Expert – Stephen Stratford

Stephen Stratford

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Cambridge editor and author Stephen Stratford chooses books of verse by a couple of good old boys, and a good-looking book by an artist.

Looking Out to Sea, by Kevin Ireland (Steele Roberts)

It took me a long time to read this: every night I would read the first poem, for Ireland’s late brother, which is so powerful that I couldn’t read any more after it. Next night I would start again: same problem. But eventually I cracked it – and it’s all good. As always there are memorable lines: “the itch that’s always at work/ under the skin of a settled existence”. In this 22nd collection Ireland is very good on happiness (a new note) and procrastination (perennial).

Expecting Miracles, by Peter Bland (Steele Roberts)

Another poetry collection from an octogenarian where it was hard to get past the opening sequence of grieving. Bland is good on grief, and on regret in general – but balancing this, as with Ireland, is a delight in the pleasures of the moment. He also ranges over music, art (who knew there was a Yorkshire painter named Grimshaw?) and youthful optimism. On a photo of himself at 19: “It’s a pose/for posterity, as if the future/ will sort everything out/and I’m bound to come good.”

(Auckland Art Gallery)

My full, rave review is here. The skinny: “Superbly designed and produced, this is the most enlightening and absorbing book on New Zealand art I have read in years. It is a brilliant piece of publishing. Now that we have the NZ Book Awards restored, this has to be a major contender.” Shows how much I know: it wasn’t even longlisted. Seriously baffling.

BooksDecember 3, 2015

Books: The Best Books of 2015 According to a Panel of 10 Experts. Our Seventh Expert – Elspeth Sandys

Elspeth Sandys

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Wellington author Elspeth Sandys chooses two venerable geniuses of modern fiction – Anne Tyler, and Kate Grenville.

Reading Anne Tyler’s A Spool of Blue Thread is like visiting an old and trusted friend. The familiar themes – family and domestic life; the passage of Time; suburban America – are all there, but with a novelist of Tyler’s skill and sensitivity there are always new twists, and fresh, laugh-out-loud humour, as we watch her un-peel another layer of the onion of ‘ordinary’ life.

Kate Grenville’s prize-winning novel, The Secret River, was written originally as a family memoir. Now, in One Life: My Mother’s Story, she has, in an act of uncanny and loving ventriloquism, given us the story of her mother’s ‘unremarkable’ life. But so skillful is her telling of the tale that the unremarkable becomes extraordinary, and light is shed on a time and place far from the major events of History, but never far from their effects.

Two memoirs published in paperback in 2014, both from Scotland, tell stories of heart-breaking childhood neglect and abuse, but at no point do they read as misery memoirs. Both authors attended the Auckland Literary Festival. Both regularly reduced their audiences to laughter. Their names are Damian Barr, whose memoir, Maggie and Me, tells of his growing up in working-class Glasgow, and actor, Alan Cumming, known to tv audiences throughout the world as Eli Gold in The Good Wife, whose memoir, Not My Father’s Son, is a testament, both moving and funny, to the power of the human spirit to survive and overcome.