Trouble

Many of the poems in this new collection from Jenny Powell share a concern with independence, celebrating the sensitive upholders of rebellion, the confused as well as the savvy, "raggedy-assed and looking for trouble"; from the "kid ready with a piece of fence", "rabbits picking / the wrong time to run" and a "grunge-punk" queen of the night (her "hair / touched up with paua shell pink"), to the "mother who fell / into her wardrobe archive of memories" and a cantankerous old man in a nursing home ("when his soap goes missing the staff are to blame"), and finally the poet herself, letting go "for a blind leap". One poem records a staircase encounter with Janet Frame, another imagines Frances Hodgkins as a reluctant resident of the Frances Hodgkins Rest Home. Always, as she observes and engages, the poet's subtle wit and sympathetic imagination are apparent.