Lots of books reviewed in this week’s Listener. Jolisa Gracewood tackles four, including Kelly Ana Morey's first novel Bloom, which

… haunted me for weeks … In this imperfect but startling novel, Morey reminds us that, in every sense that matters, the past is before us. I can't wait to see what – or whom – she conjures up next.

In Imogen de la Bere's The Welcoming Committee, "the writing is divine, but the characters have a forbidding remoteness from reality, and the story is told in a series of tenuously connected tableaux."

Lily's Cupola by Bronwyn Tate is "A rewarding read" and "reminiscent of the smart, deceptively cosy dramas of Joanna Trollope." Rosemary Wildblood's first novel Joybird is "not a bad story; in fact, it drew me along quite winningly. But the book, which alas for the author appears to have been edited in the dark, feels more like a novelisation than a novel."

Norman Bilbrough has reservations about Sky Dancer: He reckons that Ihimaera

seems to write strongly from his emotional consciousness, but the story never becomes properly coherent. Two thirds of the way through I got lost, and I was not helped by certain other aspects, such as the frivolity of the storytelling.

Bilbrough admits, though, "I may have missed the signposts. Sky Dancer charmed and exasperated me. Witi Ihimaera has handfuls of balls in the air. I wish he'd stuck with just a few."

Of the new poetry books, Peter Bland likes Vanilla Wine by Geoff Cochrane. The tone is

... Joycean and surprisingly elegant. And the elegance always comes as a surprise, because it grows out of the street-clutter and the mundane rhythms of the day-to-day life.

Stephanie Johnson's Moody Bitch is "fun and life-affirming". James Northcliffe's Rat Tickling "is refreshing … His quick perceptions, fleeting glances and litanies of association often threaten to overwhelm the poem itself. But one keeps coming back for more."

And finally, sadly, R Carl Shuker finds J G Ballard’s follow-up to Super-Cannes falling short.

In Millennium People, the Ballardian shtick that in Crash was truly a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, the heart's filthy lesson, is knowing – a sophisticated comic exercise autopiloted through 294 pages with the occasional hands-on piece of truly superb prose.