Another LeafSalon reader, Auckland poet Tania Brady, has happily (for us) consented to helping us out with the occasional poetry review. Tania is a Sydneysider by birth, but has settled on this side of the Tasman with her NZ hubby and two kids. She's had poetry and short stories published in the NZ Listener, Poetry NZ, Takahe, Turbine, Spin, Bravado and Catalyst and has been a guest editor of Blackmail Press (Issue 13). She's also very hands-on in the Auckland poetry scene and is involved this year in the Auckland launch of Poetry Pudding (Reed, $18.99 see launch details below). She's rather outrageous actually - when I first met her not long ago, quite late at a party, she was reciting a very saucy poem, about oysters if I remember rightly, to a bunch of hapless men (at their request, I must hasten to add). Putty in her hands they were.

So without further ado, as Chris will no doubt point out I always say, it's over to Tania:

The title of this book made me think of those children’s books with lift-the-flaps. I half expected poems to pop out of the pages like cut out aliens or monsters but it wasn’t at all like that. The colour of the cover, green with cartoonish yellow daffodils, gives us a small clue that this book is based on Fiona Farrell’s six month visit to Ireland, the land of her ancestors. If you are familiar with The Book of Invasions (Lebor Gabala Erenn) as a “compilation of manuscripts describing the specific discovery of Ireland (‘on the fifteenth, on a Saturday’) following the Creation and the Flood” you might better understand the title.

Some poems did “pop up”. For me, anyway. I like the way NZ shakes Ireland’s hand and introduces itself as a long lost relative, using the waka as a link in The Canoe in the National Museum. The poem begins:

Black boat from brown bog.
The line of it like a new moon
sailing. Cut from a single log.

Then, later, the New Zealand connection:

So this is how you feel, my
friend, before the waka that
had sailed clear through the
walls of the museum to
beach among whale bones.

Wrapped up at the end by:

You think of yours as I think of’
mine, setting sail in their black
canoe.

The people the people the people.

The only thing that detracted was the line break between…my / friend…it annoyed me (perhaps I’m missing something here?) but another had strong appeal - … their black / canoe, which was effective in giving “black” a harder edge and enhanced the overall meaning of the poem for me.

As a Catholic girl who still remembers her own First Communion, I found the contrasts within the landscapes of the poems Gobnait (a revered saint honoured at the well of holy Ballyvourney, particularly by children celebrating their First Communion) and Sheela-na-gig (“…the old one: the dark / hag with her slack breasts / and rattling ribs.”) hilarious. There is a strong connection in the words, both poems finding a home in the same place. In Gobnait the saint is the “patron of bees” but also “the stone woman, / legs spread wide and her / crack rubbed smooth as / Peter’s toe”. Towards the end of the poem “…bees fly among the / gravestones, bearing their / gospel of // busy and sweet.” In Sheela-na-gig, the return of the crack (and as a poet I couldn’t help thinking “craic”):

This is where you come from,
she says. This is where you
go. The cave. The cavern.
The crack.

And what a wonderful punch line at the end:

The great woman of the night
whom the tricky boy thought
to fool, till she said, ‘That’s
enough of that, my lad!’ And
slammed her thighs
shut.

There are extensive notes at back of the book on most of the poems and where specific Irish terms or place names or names of people are used I found them helpful. But they were also distracting. Poems should stand up on their own merits (even “pop up” if you like, in surprising ways) but since the notes were there I found myself flicking back often, particularly reading the notes for the poems I didn’t absorb on the first reading. For me this ruined the natural flow and pacing of the book as a whole. Often the notes gave backstory which didn’t relate to (or enhance) the subject of the poem, making it seem less, rather than more, accessible. Fiona herself says in Marginalia (the notes part at the end of the book) that “poems should stand by themselves – and I hope these do – but when I go to readings I like the asides, just as I like the footnotes in books and the marginal scribblings of an irritable scribe”. So, it’s a personal thing. Might just be me. (Let’s hope she doesn’t mind my “marginal scribblings”).

Dark humour runs through the book alongside faith, history and fable, and it was this aspect of The Pop Up Book of Invasions that I enjoyed the most.

Thanks very much Tania. There'll more from our new poetry reviewer on the way soonish.

• The Pop Up Book of Invasions is to be launched this Friday at the Auckland Central Library along with AUP's other latest book, Contemporary NZ Poets in Performance.

• The launch of the new kids poetry book Poetry Pudding, edited by Jenny Argante, is in the afternoon of Saturday July 28 at Long Bay in Auckland. You're invited to bring your children and celebrate the launch, and Montana Poetry Day, by eating cookies and cake by the sea. Come dressed up as anything to do with picnics, puddings or the sea, best costume wins a prize.

There will be readings by poets - Jack Ross, Anna Rugis, Clare Scott, Jenny Clay, Siobhan Harvey, Jacqueline Crompton Ottoway, and of course, Tania. Plus poetry lucky dips, balloons, spot prizes, snacks and drinks for kids, caregivers and poets, games and lots of fun. Sounds like a hoot to us, and always fantastic that kids can get involved in Poetry Day.

Venue: Upstairs (look for the signs) at the Sir Peter Blake Marine Education & Recreation Centre (MERC), 1045 Beach Road, Long Bay, Auckland, from 3.30 to 5.30pm.