Through Slip Stream, Paula Green is interested in how to balance a challenging experience against the continuation of everyday life, and proposes small distractions and coping strategies: solving cryptic crossword puzzles, for example, the mock-clues of which are scattered through the poems. Making up a fluid, intensely felt narrative, these poems are untitled and mostly short, charting time passing and seasons turning by procedures done, books read, appointments made, food cooked and dreams dreamed. The language used is deceptively simple, but the poems speak to each other by these links, tricks and coping games. Though clearly deriving from Green's own experiences of surviving breast cancer, the sequence is not a simple, therapeutic record of true happenings but a carefully crafted collection after the fact, contrasting 'she doesn't try to make poetry out of her experience' against 'but keeps a diary like a scrap basket, just in case'. Slip Stream is both a moving but uplifting book about a experience with cancer and a writer's thoughtful exploration of how life may (or may not) be expressed in words. AUP's reader called it 'a brave and healing book full of pleasures'.
- ISBN10 1306193176
- ISBN13 9781306193177
- Publish Date 1 January 2013 (first published 1 October 2010)
- Publish Status Active
- Out of Print 25 February 2015
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Auckland University Press
- Format eBook
- Pages 89
- Language English