Harvey McQueen is a leading New Zealand poet, anthologist and educator who’s been publishing works since the 70s. When teaching poetry I still pull out the stacks of ‘Ten Modern New Zealand Poets’ and ‘A Cage of Words’, collections Harvey’s put together to help demystify NZ poetry for young people.

‘These I Have Loved’ is a new collection of Harvey’s 100 favourite New Zealand poems, divided into sections such as “Love the world”, “You know the place”, “When can their glory fade”. Harvey starts each section with a description of what the poems mean to him, with explanations ranging from personal acquaintance with the poets to the poems having ‘struck a chord’ with him at High School.

The lovely thing about this being a collection of personal favourites is that there’s no obligation to include certain works or a particular balance. The section “The peach tree at my door is broken” only includes poems by James K Baxter, who Harvey says “bestrides my poetry-life like a colossus.” and Allen Curnow also gets a lot of exposure. Harvey says of them both, “In their different ways they gave an explanation of the human capacity for evil and cruelty which seemed to cut across all our dreams.” Reflection on the classics is inevitable and necessary when covering the history of New Zealand poetry, but Harvey’s an avid reader and it’s pleasing to come across Amy Brown’s villanelle and Mark Pirie’s take on William Carlos Williams’ ‘This is just to say.’

This book is a wonderful culmination of a lifetime spent reading, writing and teaching poetry. Here’s a James K Baxter poem, one of my many favourites from Harvey’s collection:

Haere Ra

Farewell to Hiruharama –
The green hills and the river fog
Cradling the convent and the Maori houses –

The peach tree at my door is broken, sister,
It carried too much fruit,
It hangs now by a bent strip of bark –

But better that way than the grey moss
Cloaking the branch like an old man’s beard;
We are broken by the Love of Many

And then we are at peace
Like the fog, like the river, like the roofless house
That lets the sun stream in because it cannot help it.

I’ve just finished reading this book – my first of the Jackson Brodie series – and I’m now determined to read everything Kate Atkinson has ever written.

This is a detective story but it’s incredibly clever in the way the fully-developed characters’ stories intertwine and their preoccupations clash and collide. Tracy, an ex-cop, sees a child being mistreated in the street and, bizarrely, offers to buy her on the spot. At the same time, private detective Jackson Brodie witnesses a brutish man kicking his dog and – on a similar whim to Tracy – snatches the whippet away and takes care of it.

The themes here are largely about responsibilities to protect. There are characters who can’t have children, characters who have lost children, missing children and misplaced children. Not to mention the dog. Each character has a different and convincing motive for their actions and when we look back into the past, we see the reasons behind each motion is deeply set in a disturbing incident from 1975.

This is not your ordinary detective novel. Kate Atkinson uses straight forward language flecked with perfect descriptions. When investigating adopted Hope McMaster’s past, for a long time Jackson finds nothing, her “past was all echoes and shadows, like looking into a box of fog.” And as different moments are seen from different points of view, the characters refer to what they experience in terms of what they know, often reflecting back on earlier descriptions.

Kate Atkinson deftly switches between character voices to give a well-rounded sense of scene and a clear picture of this particular part of society – crooked cops, prostitutes, aging television stars – all of whom play a crucial role in the outcome.

By the end of this book I was trying to understand why on earth I could relate to the narrator. I have nothing in common with Oxford student, James who falls in with a crowd beyond his own sophistication and wealth. He lives the life of excess with a ready-made circle of friends and finds – by the end of it – that he’s been in love with both his stable, sensible violinist girlfriend Jess and the over-indulging somewhat chaotic Mark.

The first person narrative reminded me of Fitzgerald’s Nick Carraway in the reflective tone and sense of awe at the people he is mingling with. The great skill in this novel is definitely the characterisation as, although I don’t know people like this, I totally believed in their existence, their reactions and disappointments.

Beyond the Oxford years, life goes on and when tragedy strikes, the characters respond in the same ways they’ve always responded: moving on, dropping out or sticking hopelessly nearby. The novel spans over 10 years of these characters lives but there’s something timeless about them. The lack of references to modern society is subtle enough that, I imagine, any generation would recognise in this their own awkward shift from university to the ‘real world’.

Every moment feels crucial and convincing as James describes relationships, secrets and his own failings to be quite the person he thought he was.