NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

Hokitika is a small town on the West Coast of the South Island of New Zealand. This anthology contains the work of 19th century poets, who have written from or about the town.

Hugh Smith opens with the lines

	Dear reader, be you man or boy,
	Or, better still, fair woman,
	Read not my book if you expect
	It much above the common;

There is an ode on the opening of a waterwheel in 1868, a ballad about a fight and court case between a gold-digger and a Jewish hawker, poems about chewing-gum and the coming of electric light, as well as the usually types of eulogy found in localised anthologies. The poems give an excellent insight into the life of a coastal town with more contacts across the Tasman Sea in Melbourne than across the Southern Alps to Christchurch.

Untypical of the collection as a whole, but one of my favourites is Angus O'Cohen's SHIVER ME TIMBERS which uses words to build up real tension

	Tis not
	The booze
	Or phantom crews
	In battle
	The rattle
	Is not cattle
	In stampede
	...
	
	Give thanks
	The clanks
	Are caused
	By planks
	That shiver
	In the cold
	Above the river
	...

Pocket-sized with an attractive hard binding the book is a delightful treasure for anyone with an interest in the life of this old gold-mining port and its environs.