By Jo McNeice
Set in the green spaces and urban grit of contemporary Te Whanganui-a-Tara, this award-winning debut collection from poet Jo McNeice unfolds like a Gothic fairytale. Darkness and light ripple through these haunting, intimate poems, which draw on themes of love, madness, betrayal, desire and recovery to tell the story of a woman searching among the images and events of her life for answers – sometimes finding them, sometimes not.
Blue Hour grapples with the complexities of human nature, mental health and relationships. ‘You know,’ writes McNeice, ‘we are irregular verbs. / You know the universe is harsh.’ In the remarkable universe created by these poems, the irregular is allowed. Here, mermaids, angels and wolves share space with everyday sparrows in plum trees and dandelions on the lawn.
Meet me in the in-between
where the negative
is being developed.
From ‘Blue hour’
‘The voice is beautiful yet unsettling, aching yet funny, lyric yet gritty. Blue Hour is constructed in such a way that fragments, memories and allusions circle and surge, build and resound. It feels as if the poet is reaching across an almost impossible divide to show the reader what it’s like.’ – Anne Kennedy
'A muscular and melodic dissection of the human heart both unflinching and urgent. A shifting kaleidoscope of light and darkness, entrapment and escape. At every turn new visions slide into view, delicately balanced and shimmering on the edge of perception. An exquisite collection of resounding originality.' – Claire Orchard
Author
Jo McNeice is a poet based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington. She completed a Master of Arts in Creative Writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters, Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington, in 2013, and her poems have been published in Turbine | Kapohau, Sport, JAAM and Mayhem. In 2023, McNeice won the prestigious Kathleen Grattan Poetry Award for her manuscript Blue Hour.
Publication detail
Poetry
Paperback, 230x 150mm, 68pp
ISBN 9781990048821
RRP $30
Release date: 7 November 2024
Reviews and Interviews
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'Another forceful debut. Jo McNeice deals with mental states, sometimes despairing, sometimes determined to keep going in the battle of life, yet introduced by two poems that are fully idyllic.' Read
Review: ‘What first struck me was how wonderfully different these poems are. How unlike anything I’ve read in a long time. They take space to breathe and expand and contract across the page, but they also feel super intimate and reveal a lot about the speaker of the poems.’ – Melissa Oliver for Nine to Noon, RNZ Listen
Review: 'There’s romance, the dissolution of at least one relationship, a reckoning with mental illness, forays into the worlds of myth and movie, and odes to the natural world. It’s serious but not staid, playful but not twee; it’s by turns lavish and clipped, often ushering the reader into a room that might feel familiar, then switching off the light and letting unease creep in.'
'This is a book that reveals more luminous beauty with each additional reading, offering new connections from image to image, poem to poem, drawing its reader ever deeper.' – Sophie van Waardenberg for Kete Books Read