Dancing to My Tune: Verse and poems by Dennis Glover.

Published by The Catspaw Press. Reviewed by Lynn Peck.

Take a hunk of the landscape, a heaped shovel of the attitudes and prejudices of the populous, mix it well with booze, pour it out, and you have a poem.....by Dennis Glover, With a little bit of luck, and more mixing, the end product could even be a piece of prose, or, to the amazement of Glover fans, an original art work.

Times have changed, times are changing, times will go on changing, but never will it be so great as to be inexpressible by the imagination of Glover. In this anthology Glover has the universe dancing to his tune, be it the 'Pocky Cracked Old Moon' or any other heavenly body that attracts his cynical amusement, as well as the public servant with the only thing to look forward to being the 'bosses secretary's behind'.

Glover's cynicism isn't limited to the skys, and wandering eyes of people; the mighty ships and windy politicians as well as the notorious Smith of Rhodesia all come under his hammer of condemnation.

'Washington, heroic name.
Whacked the Hanoverian's head
But of a man of the name of Smith
What can be said?'

The geographical regions Glover knows are caught by his sensitivity and frozen in a poem much the same way as the Turnbull Library has the Glover family frozen in a photograph forever. Yet whereas the Glover family is stiff and formal in their eternal pose, the poems throb will far out live the man. Lake Manapouri and Wellington aren't just place names on the map, they are borders encasing memories, thoughts, and emotions of a man.

'Wellington on a Wet Sunday' communicates the squalid beauty of a city of which it is said 'Earth has not anything to show less fair'. In this bitter sonnet Wellington is paradoxically transformed from a locality to a living entity with 'all those mighty mortgages lying still'.

Glover is not given totally to political satire, or landscape painting with words. In his imagination there lives some of the most sensitive love poems of our time. 'This to Lyn', 'Towards a Piece of Verse' and "This for My Lyn' are among some in this anthology. These poems do not have the customary Moves labour lost' theme, but rather the permanency of a lifetime love affair. And what more can a man give to a cause than a lifetime?

Someone Like You: Roald Dahl. Penguin Paperback. $1.35.

Reviewed by Maria De Lorenzo.

Roald Dahl, whose short stories have only recently attracted New Zealand readers, possesses an extraordinary, comic imagination and a gift for creating tension and suspense. His easy, flowing style enables us to slip into the story with absolutely no effort at all, and before we know it we are caught up in a tale impossible to put down until the end. "Someone Like You" contains fifteen such tales, all very different yet similar in their art of enthralling. Many of his clever plots ileal with casual bets, which turn out to be not so casual. The stakes are high, e.g. a finger, a daughter, even ones own life, as is the case with Mr Botibal who leaps into the middle of the ocean in the hope of winning the ship's pool. Others are concerned with the deviousness and cunning of human nature. "May Lady Love, My Dove" is an example of this.

Here, one piece of trickery leads to the unveiling of another, which in its turn breeds more trickery, and so it goes on.....

Mr Dahl seems to delight in uncovering the less noble, but nonetheless amusing aspects of human character, especially in people whom you would expect to be the very embodiment of nobility, nobility itself, the wealthy, the social elite. We are shown that society is not always the comfortable place it might seem. It can be a source of great humiliation as Lionel the hero of "Nunc Dimitis" discovers. Undaunted however, he seeks revenge. His method is as cunning as it is cruel, but the way it exploits human vanity is most humorous and a light touch is retained by the ending in which the manipulator is himself manipulated, as the victim gives back as good as she gets — well, almost. By an unexpected little twist, both character and reader are caught unawares. These stories rarely end quite as we might expect, and here lies, I think, much of Roald Dahl's charm as a story teller: his ability to lead us on in one direction, then all of a sudden making a volte-face, leaving us a trifle shocked, greatly surprised and much amused.