The Blue Voyage and Other Poems

The Blue Voyage and Other Poems is a new collection by Anne French – elegiac in tone and confident in execution. A more comic initial section (by noted New Zealand regional poet ‘William Butler Smith’) leads into a section of thoughtful but vivid sailing poems and then a number of elegies, laments and funeral songs from French’s ‘black notebook’. The final section voyages to Korea and includes some loose translations of poems by modernist Korean writer Han Yong-un. In their considerations of remembrance and writerly acts, these ‘translations’ aptly pick up themes introduced in the book’s first three parts and round off the book nicely: ‘Waiting / for the ringing of the bells announcing daybreak, / I put down my brush.’