INFO
| Name | This Paper Boat |
| Year | 2016 |
| Writer(s) | Gregory Kan |
| Publisher | Auckland University Press |
| Type of Text | Poetry |
| Artform | Literature |
ABOUT
Gregory Kan’s first collection of poetry This Paper Boat interweaves personal history and the lasting effects of trauma, with fragments of poems by Iris Wilkinson (early 20th-century New Zealand writer Robin Hyde). Published by Auckland University Press in 2016, the book was shortlisted for the Best Poetry Award at the 2017 New Zealand Book Awards, where it was summarised as follows:
This ambitious debut collection is built around slivers of life-narrative, principally drawn from the life of Iris Wilkinson (Robin Hyde) and — with moving laconic restraint — from the lives of the poet’s parents, before and after coming to New Zealand. These strands are made to intertwine with, and haunt, each other, not least through the evocation of various Chinese ghosts. The collection aches with bewildered loss, a sense of emotional loose ends and pasts only half-grasped.
Throughout the book, Kan uses the initial ‘I.’, for Iris, as well as ‘I’ referring to the first-person narrator. Slipping back and forth between the two, Kan’s approach to writing was to arrange and collage with text written by both Robin Hyde and himself — a process he has described as more physical than cerebral:
In a textural sense I did a lot of collage with her stuff, so I would take some of her images and use them to talk through… I was basically splicing our texts together. I would look at the weird collage, splice some more stuff in, look at it again, write some more myself, splice some of the stuff in and I would also invert that and do the same with her work and put some of my images and lines into her work, just to see how they would interact with each other.
Described in a review by Bridgid Mager as “bravely nudging poetic boundaries”, Kan’s experimental and transparent process using non-linear and parallel narratives produces a collection “rich in understatedly beautiful imagery”.
