Cilla McQueen is one of my favourite New Zealand poets. One of her early collections, Antigravity, just really caught my imagination and I've been a fan ever since. So I was happy to get my hands on this, which is I think her latest book? It came out a couple of years ago, so there might be a new one now... but anyway. I have it and I've read it and that's the main thing.

It's an ambitious idea, writing a memoir in verse. There's such a potential for disconnection, but because McQueen opts - very sensibly, I think - to title her poems with the year of the events referred to in that poem, and to skip years instead of trying to pad out the book, that disconnection is minimised. It really felt like a cohesive narrative of her early life. Of that life, I must admit, I knew very little, but the picture given by In a Slant Light is so clear and quietly compelling that my previous ignorance didn't actually matter. And anyway, that ignorance is itself qualified somewhat. The setting for many of these poems is Dunedin, in the South Island of NZ, a place where I lived myself for many years (albeit at a different time from McQueen). It's wonderful to be able to read poems about places that are so familiar to me; I could really see the images contained here in my mind. A lovely collection.