Mateship With Birds

That default 1950s rural town, a place of kookaburras and few neighbours and a brief isolation. Spaces and boundaries and tracks across properties: a clunky crossover of human and bird life. The unexamined strangeness of heterosexuality is half-examined as the neighbours cross paths, murkily examined and deliberately disturbing, sometimes sickening, delicately unpeeled and undressed. From milking to tea. Small ornithology and kookaburra poetry. Slippage in point of view. Boyhood and bestiality, weird codes of heteronormativity.

The Luminaries

Knotted into the signs of the zodiac, the gravity of the heavenly bodies, the waning of the moon. The opening is dense, elegant, pitch-perfect, the end is urgent, a slice of light. Numbers, prices, dates sink into the consciousness until, finally, the threads settle. Caught in the ruined beauty of 19th century New Zealand gold mines, opium dens, séances, prostitution, silk dresses, hotel rooms. The narrative voice is present and Victorian. Always beautiful, always on the cusp of confusion. The language holds me. So many pages I begin to miss them. Intricate, intelligent, ever-expanding as the late skies.