- Published: 21 October 2015
- ISBN: 9781775538318
- Imprint: Random House NZ
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 352
- RRP: $36.99
Boundaries
People and Places of Central Otago
- Published: 21 October 2015
- ISBN: 9781775538318
- Imprint: Random House NZ
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 352
- RRP: $36.99
Author, conservationist and Central Otago local, Brian Turner has written a series of books in recent years which glorify his community and its lush landscape. From the non-fiction mix of anecdote and poetry, Into the Wider World (Godwit, 2008) to the collection of verse, Elemental: Central Otago Poems (Godwit, 2012), Turner's praise and call for preservation of his rural region is fundamental to his literary production. . . . Always, even when the work offered isn't a poem, the author's poetry shapes his clever, comfortable storytelling . . . Of course the most palpable member of Boundaries remains the landscape. Turner's rich poems, such as First Snow of Winter and Where Heaven Is depict the natural world as a pulsating, living entity in need of our preservation and defense. . . . With its' bricolage of people and places, poems and prose, Brian Turner's Boundaries is a New Zealand heartland story sure to delight.
Siobhan Harvey, NZ Stuff
Early in this composite prose-poetry miscellany about Central Otago, Brian Turner quotes with approval from the English poet Edward Thomas’s “The Mountain Chapel”: “When gods were young / This wind was old.” Which is apt, as Turner could be seen as a kind of local literary descendant of Thomas. (Thomas died from a bomb-blast at Arras on Easter Monday exactly a hundred years ago.) Both are born-again countrymen, chroniclers and champions of vanishing rural worlds. Both have a powerful “retrospectroscope”, as Turner calls it, through which to stare at past and present. Their poems offer a tough celebration of the natural world and its processes, also a downbeat, dented lyricism. Both are blessed, or plagued, by an honesty others sometimes find awkward. Such analogies can be pushed too far, but this one helps to pinpoint something of what makes Turner so distinctive a voice and presence among contemporary New Zealand writers.
Harry Ricketts, NZ Books