I’ve just read Damien Wilkins’ new book For Everyone Concerned and other stories, (VUP, $30). These little stories (some of them are just a page or two, one only two lines) are like a box of chocolates, to risk a Forrest Gump metaphor.

Each one is a meticulously crafted, luminous gem that shows a hawk-eyed passion for human foibles and failings – they make me think of Nabokov. They often feature some of the most irritating of people that cross our paths – a pernickety (but frightened, tender, hilarious) father, the possessive, snippy girlfriend of a brother. The father stories (and there are several) only use conversation – conversation that is so cleverly written as to create a picture in your mind of the two that is almost all-encompassing.

Most made me smile, at some I laughed out loud. american microphones was one where I laughed till I actually cried – about Damien reading his work to a room full of Americans who constantly get up to the bathroom, can’t hear him and request re-runs, burp and fart: ‘At some profound level’ he writes, ‘I think of Americans as dangerously carbonated people.’) As he gets closer to his 'nice sentence' they all hear tennis players outside shouting 'fuck' and arguing over baselines.

I hugely enjoyed munching on a few of these delights just before bed; saving the rest for later, I thought of them in the evening with anticipation. There’s an audio link on Auckland’s bFM where you can hear Damien being interviewed by Tim Neale here. Love your work, Mr Wilkins. Yum.

Montana Poetry Day is coming up on Friday July 27 with appearances all over the country from our best poets. NZ Book Month has three of them blogging at the moment – Fiona Farrell, Montana-nominated James Brown and Andrew Johnston, who’s over for a year from Paris, working on a major study of NZ Poetry. As a new dad he’s in the kitchen a lot and waxes lyrical over the connection between food and poetry.

Imagine my glow then when I picked out of the post this morning the new Elizabeth Smither poetry book The Year of Adverbs (AUP), and opened it immediately to this:

Making tarte Tatin

The apples, halved and cored and golden
sit in the caramel like big-bottomed nudes
before the pastry, like a big bath-sheet, covers them.

Is this a new method of writing recipes? Transcribing
by imagery. The next then is fake violence.
Upend the tin with a firm slap of the rolling pin

and out come eight golden breasts
swimming through silk with a touch of
severe wrist-crust propriety.

Yum again! It’s all about the yum.