Poetry causes the spirit to fly

Cath Koa Dunsford tells us in her review of Selina Tusitala Marsh’s Fast Talking Pi (Auckland University Press 2009) that ‘…poetry is, in essence, Talkstory, or mo’olelo from my own Pacific heritage, the Hawai’ian Talkstory, literally meaning ‘to cause the spirit to fly between people’. She says this is an apt description of Marsh’s work. Click here for that review. I haven’t read Fast Talking Pi but I have just read Susan Hampton’s new poetry collection News of the Insect World (Five Islands 2009) It will take out a string of awards as indeed it too causes the spirit to fly between people. I will go back now and read The Kindly Ones (Five Islands 2006), a collection I set to one side, for no other reason than at that time there were too many distractions for poetry. When the wish was for poetry to be the only distraction.