By Alison Glenny (Compound Press, 2024)
/slanted is Alison Glenny’s third poem collection, full of the sort of poems that I find hard to explain and easy to deeply, deeply love. The word ‘ECHO’ echoing multiple-y across the page, for example, fading out then gone, as echoes do and are in the mountains. /slanted is a slant, light, mountain of a book that takes us intimately into in Kā Tiritiri o te Moana / Southern Alps, with poem arranged to tell ‘THREE ALTERATIONS OF Freda Du Faur’, the first woman to climb to the top of Aoraki Mount Cook.
Poems in the sections named ‘the mountain lover’ and ‘notebook afterword’ borrow from Du Faur’s rather formally-written 1915 memoir, The Conquest of Mount Cook and other Climbs. Glenny transforms Du Faur’s accounts of her journeys into moments that a reader can feel. The poems are art on the page. Images, often literally. A climb of words, untangled, reveal ‘SNOW HEIGHTS’, a marvellous arrangement with the word ‘blazed’ repeated, close, above an upside down spaced out ‘felt like walking on clouds’. Sometimes the images are metaphorical, through fragments, dense and delicious. ‘crystal splits a vision, a lens to scry/ a singularity. A lake, lack or a prism’. Say it out loud. As well as to the eye, it’s amazing to the ear.
It’s the sort of book, anyway, that’s nice to show off, if you’re judging it by both covers and content. Beautifully made. Compound Press use recycled materials to print and bind their books in Tāmaki Makaurau and they have a stellar catalogue – maybe check out Jasmine Gallagher’s Dirge Bucolic or Hana Pera Aoake’s A bathful of kawakawa and hot water.
These are the sort of poems to come back and back and back to, every page. I will never climb that high into the mountains but reading /slanted I feel I’m among them. Expansive.
One of my late summer plans is to take /slanted on a tramping trip. To let it soak in, in the outdoors, maybe with my feet in Sealy Tarns, as the words and the mountains take on a new slant on the page.
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Liz Breslin
