The Victims of Lightning

by Bill Manhire

Building on previous themes and introducing some new techniques, this collection reveals a respected poet at the height of his powers. Here are finely crafted lyrics, found poems, a bracket of songs, and complex emotions—all tempered by the use of humor.

Genres: Poetry

112 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2010

About the author

Bill Manhire was born in Invercargill in 1946. He was his country's inaugural Poet Laureate and has won the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry four times. He holds a personal chair at the Victoria University of Wellington, where he directs the celebrated creative writing programme and the International Institute of Modern Letters. His volume of short fiction, South Pacific, was published by Carcanet in 1994.

Reviews

[Bob · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bill likes to say a lot with a little and is excellent at doing so. There are around ten poems here that, though simple on the surface, I have been returning to over and over this past month and drawing out new clues and aspects each time. That being said, a large portion of the poems here lean a tad too far on the minimal side for me, and to my ear wander towards obscurantism and unfinished-ness. But that's probably down to taste for the most part. I'm now on a man(hire)hunt for more.

[Octavia Cade · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are some good poems in here. I particularly liked "Herschel at the Cape", a biographical poem of the astronomer John Herschel, and I loved "Yadasi Clips" which is the stand-out poem of the whole collection to my mind, and has shot onto my list of all-time favourites.

One thing I did notice, throughout the collection, is Manhire's focus on repetition within his poems. Repeated words, repeated lines... it's an interesting technique, but I found it over-used here, and I thought that some poems (e.g. "Poem Beginning with a Line by Ralph Hotere" and "Warehouse Curtains") really sank under the weight of it.