Town, Madeleine Slavick, The Cuba Press, 2024

Madeleine Slavick’s Town is her first book to be published in Aotearoa New Zealand. Born in the USA, she spent nearly 25 years living in Hong Kong before moving to a country road in the Wairarapa. Like this new collection, her previous books bring together poetry, stories and photographs. Town, exquisitely designed by Tara Malone and Paul Stewart at The Cuba Press, fits in the palm of your hand, the paper stock beautiful. It contains 50 stories and 50 photographs – and, in my mind, I call it a poetry collection.

I am immediately drawn into the pace of writing, the ambulatory beat, where as reader you become meandering walker, pausing to check the view, to dawdle between the lines, to linger upon an image, a single word. I am reminded of Blanche Baughan’s predilection for walking, for Jenny Bornholdt’s magnificent ‘Confessional’ in The Rocky Shore (THWUP, 2008). In Town, you encounter birds, buildings, letterboxes, paddocks and livestock, but as you travel, images yield memory, admissions, anecdotes, and the book you hold in your hand becomes a pocket memoir.

‘Language’ is the word dancing on the tip of my tongue as I read. These gems for example: “‘Need’ and ‘want’, the same word in Cantonese.” “In Cantonese, ‘editing’ is ‘washing.'” And then the poet is ‘back at the desk, washing’. A new country of residence is a lexicon of unfamiliar words, a new language to learn (te reo Māori for Madeleine), a new way of naming and being named (as in Hong Kong).

Ah. Walking is a form of writing, writing is a form of walking, and the wandering thoughts trace beauty and sky, parenting challenges, body and illness, thefts from paddocks and letterboxes. Writing poetry is a satisfying way of recording, laying down an album of memory, of delight. In Madeleine’s exquisite album, tiny exposures establish a sensual chain, carefully chosen ‘shots’ that, as we keep reading walking reading, sit within and burst out of the frame.

Madeleine writes:

Do you feel exposed after writing a memoir; can we trust
what you write, have you always known you were a
writer, is the ear more important than the eye, was the
book an essential item during the pandemic? Was the writer?

from ‘WRITE, WRITER’

Madeleine’s photographs exude warmth – not just in the earthy colour palette but the visual focus, the satisfying composition: a building, a sign, the sky, shadows, the road. There are never people; the bench is empty, the footpath empty, the field an expanse of grass. It is as though I am invited to occupy the scene, for a sweet moment, to store an interplay of light and dark for a later date.

On the back of the book, Hinemoana Baker nails her endorsement: ‘Town is reminiscent of Robert Hass at his most beautifully imagistic, or Georgia O’Keeffe telling deep stories in flowers.’ Yes this a book to fall into, to savour the joy of contemplation, to recognise the ugly, the surprising, the familiar. It is a book of wonder.

Madeleine Slavick was born and educated in USA, lived in Hong Kong for almost twenty-five years and now lives in Wairarapa, Aotearoa. She is the author of Something Beautiful Might Happen, Fifty Stories Fifty Images, delicate access 微妙之途 and Round: Poems and Photographs of Asia. Town is her first book published in New Zealand.

Interview with Mark Amery. Madeleine reads the title poem of the book at 1’25. 

“She is Seven” – installed in Whakaoriori Masterton video reading as part of the Outdoor Poems project

The Cuba Press page