INFO
| Name | Under Glass |
| Year | 2019 |
| Writer(s) | Gregory Kan |
| Publisher | Auckland University Press |
| Type of Text | Poetry |
| Artform | Literature |
ABOUT
Under Glass is Gregory Kan’s second book of poetry, published by Auckland University Press in 2019. Longlisted for the Best Poetry Award at the 2020 New Zealand Book Awards, Under Glass “is a dialogue between a series of prose poems, following a protagonist through a mysterious and threatening landscape, and a series of verse poems, driven by the speaker’s compulsive hunger to make sense of things.”
In the book, much is hinted at but not described and is instead left up to the reader to fill in with their own experiences or models of the world. Throughout the series of prose poems, Kan uses the “comfort of a linear narrative” to give readers a sense of progression, which entails a journey through a “coarse” and constructed world with two suns. In contrast, the lyric or verse poems take the form of a personal address or long letter to an unknown recipient — a series of thoughts that are “a cloud of possibilities”.
Kan explored the theme of how one processes trauma in his first book This Paper Boat, with references to specific events and interactions. While dealing with trauma is still the focus, in Under Glass Kan wanted to see how far he could go in conjuring events without naming or referencing them. Rather than being told about how trauma is processed or dealt with, Under Glass “tries as much as possible to bring the reader through what that [process] actually looks and feels like.”
