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Hope (United Kingdom) (2007/06/10):
This is a series of poems arranged in chapters telling the story of a murder, and the hunt for the killer. There are a number of Australian English words in here that I didn't know, so I was glad of the glossary at the back of the book. I found it difficult to know what pace to read this at, because the words themselves feel as though they should be read in short, sharp bursts, like gunfire. Each new poem and its title induces an overly long pause, I felt, in the plot. Some of the poems felt disjointed (within themselves and from each other), and there were times when I found the rhythm of the words broke up completely and I didn't know how best to read them/hear them. This disjointedness made me want to read faster so that I didn't lose what was essential - the plot. Although this is collectively a narrative in poem form (or poems), the narrative in this one feels a lot less clear because of the sparsity and breaks to the rhythm of the pieces. It is a quite different experience to reading blocks of verse that form a story or stories, arranged in cantos. It did not feel like a story that rolled along at a predictable pace, with the odd pause for breath and a few surprise moments. Maybe this is one of those books that is best as an audio book, read by someone who knows this particular language/dialect, and who has a properly tuned ear to this particular kind of music?
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