By Gregory Kan (Auckland University Press, 2025)
Clay Eaters is Wellington-based poet Gregory Kan’s third collection. In it, he takes us far from here in space and time to a jungle island, one that is both figuratively and literally hard to navigate due to the tangled nature of memory, and the unreliability of maps. It draws on Kan’s own experiences of military training on Tekong Island, off the coast of Singapore, as well as outside histories and stories of the place, and also on his current life, and that of his parents, in Aotearoa.
There are ghosts. The people who used to live on the island before the military took it over (“The empty Malay school”); family members who moved overseas; a father diminished by of stroke; a dead couple channelling their inharmonious marriage through a medium; a Māori soldier who lived in Malaya long ago, delighted by to find similarities in language (“‘ika is ‘ikan’, ‘rima’ is ‘lima’, ‘tangi’ is ‘tangis’, and so on.”) And the spirit of a much-loved cat, Gilgamesh, recently deceased, who stalks the whole collection. The grief keeps inserting itself like a tick.
Kan’s writing is spare. He extracts meaning without the need for complicated language, or structures. I love that about Clay Eaters. The context is very specific, but it speaks simply and broadly to how each of us must navigate our presents, always troubled by our pasts. “Sometimes it feels stupid to be haunted by a place I haven’t seen / In over a decade / Zooming in and out on Google Maps’ satellite view.”
LAURA WILLIAMSON
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