Synopses & Reviews
This book is a collection of poetry by 21st-century writer Kerry Hines, alongside images by 19th-century photographer William Williams. The wry, plainspoken but haunting poems sit alongside evocative photographs of settlement: landscapes, streetscapes, skyscapes; the escapades of a trio of flatmates; portraits of family and friends; burned bush and rising buildings. The book features many figures: Williams and his housemates Tom and Alex; ethnographer Elsdon Best; notorious criminals and the judges who sentenced them; the mythic creature Shellycoat who accompanied the Scottish settlers; wives, prostitutes, and “hallelujah lassies”; and visiting professor Robert Wallace, who cast an outsider view on this new society. Together, the stunning photographs and poems of Young Country offer a meditation on how we capture the present and re-present the past, on the parallels between building a community and authoring a text, and on the possibilities that expansive fiction offers to documented truth.
About the Author
Kerry Hines has presented papers on her research at conferences in New Zealand, Australia, and the UK, and contributed an essay on William Williams to Early New Zealand Photography: Images and Essays. Her poetry has been published in literary journals and magazines and in the coauthored collection Millionaire’s Shortbread.