This Paper Boat

Book excerpt: In This Paper Boat, poet Gregory Kan traces the life and written fragments of Robin Hyde, vivid with imagery and impression – the tide pool at Island Bay and its shrimp, the driftwood and crushed lemon leaves. He listens to the stories of his parents and of their parents, the eels and milk, frangipani trees and barbed wire of their childhoods. He remembers a jungle of his own; he searches for a friend gone astray; he finds ghosts. Entwined as narrative but reft with fragments, this book examines the public and private rituals of institutions, martial and medical, and of communities, families and individuals. With the irreparable fractures in identity and material, time and space, the author discovers a world driven by its incompleteness and constructability.