In Islands, Titus Books and Atuanui Press publisher Brett Cross parallels the evolution of Aotearoa with that of its human residents. Cross’ chiseled poems arrange in a compact seventy-five-page format without explanatory notes. Part I, ‘backyard,’ populates the landscapes of New Zealand’s Waikato region. Part II’s ‘five seasons’ of colour, mood, and location blur into each other, accumulating stories of people and place. For example, the colours of ‘2. gold / celibacy / jungle’ shift from yellow to orange, red, bronze, copper, olive, and “milk” as they morph into the next section (36), ‘3. white /destitute / graveyard.’ Part III, ‘islands,’ solidifies the previous poems, a stark, aerial perspective revealing the book as a psychogeography of islands.
Cross challenges the polarisation of nature and culture by mapping people as part of Earth’s patterns. While acknowledging anthropogenic damage, he reframes rather than resists human concerns, including colonialism and industrialisation. The collection opens on a sketch of place: “the bees write, a single line” above wooden stairs (9), rising over cul-de-sacs, fish-and-chip shops, twisting kites, and low clouds to a bird’s-eye view that presages Part III. The land is personified in its kinship with people across time:
track back, track back, track back yesterday’s, strain, brimming, skin harbour elastic, stretched smooth [……………………………………] in the Pacific, and dark, with repetition (11)
Islands’ people are diverse, like its animals, plants, and places. Multiple personas demonstrate historical and contemporary activities on the land. Waves that “gather food / and rituals” and “the white money that rains / from the countryside” prompt a range of harmonious and tragic experiences as people intermingle with environments (58; 18). One location is
home: a fireplace, kicked gravel and mud shells shift underfoot the kids, the whānau shift, in the dark the ocean a black carpet that spreads itself right up to our perch (29)
In another location, colonial history is a “sickness” (47), “the sky tainted” with disregard for the natural forces of place (40). Industrial and military references blend past, present, and future populations. “[S]oldiers / flower / their beds” (49), anaphoric ‘shells’ of war and death mixing all eras and manifesting in the land.
the shore is distant shells distant, in the past or prolonged, the future (26)
A string of character vignettes weaves a social ecology in which no individual is more important than another. Multiple ‘he’s, ‘she’s, and ‘we’s give voice not only to the poet and his characters, but also to culture itself evolving. People transitioning from past to future, place to place, married to single, male to female, and imprisoned to free all contribute narrative threads.
Islands’ short, clean lines lack capitalisation, and unpunctuated line breaks allow for a flexible semantics. Cross’ commas and semicolons symbolically cluster and divide, emphasising a thematic search for belonging to society and place:
the bones flower, through the grass fertilise; the spirits that lay, him into himself; torso arranged in its place the alphabet of the citizen recited (40)
Cross ruminates on personal and national identity, noting that after release from oppression, it can feel “absurd / to be yourself” (65). References to gender roles and drag highlight a sociopolitical movement from conservatism to authenticity. Characters rebelling against “the topography / of sports jerseys” express an unmet need for culture and ritual (46):
paint the nails, orange mascara the eyes dye the loin cloth red, green feathers from bands, stamp the dirt, dust (32) they testosterone the street bands of delinquent (33)
Human narratives unfold within time warps, against a more-than-human backdrop:
boats slip past in the dark as exodus (24) shadows mount the boats eels slipping into a future [………………………] lapping; half-light, dawn boats drifting (25)
Boats are a multivalent motif signifying Indigenous, settler, tourist, and animal activity. Canoes reference Māori traditions in which seven tribes (or waka, meaning canoe) arrived by sea from Polynesia, and Māori creation stories in which Aotearoa landmasses formed from overturned canoes (Taonui, “Canoe traditions”). Islands’ use of story functions as a device for addressing ongoing divisions between settler and Indigenous cultures, and between people and place. Cross’ boats and canoes journey through narrative from a violent history toward a decolonised future, suggesting cultural progression: “a canoe is scraped […] hang up the rags, light a fire / get warm, throw the shellfish on […] listen out / for voices, footsteps, paddles” (73).
Since Islands’ people are part of place, they mesh with animal and plant ecologies. Seagulls hold special significance as symbols of migration, colonisation, tourism, isolation at sea, and natural phenomena, including islands. Māori names for flora and fauna designate places and mix Indigenous with settler viewpoints. In one tangled landscape,
tōtara, rimu, scent: musty, nikau-damp forest towers, crowns scoring the heavens the tūīs charm, pīwakawaka flit, the kererū crashes (30)
The iconic New Zealand fern appears on whimsical “shoes / koru / at their tips” (36), a fresh spiral growth to guide human steps. Place is fluid, alive, a shapeshifting lifeform. A canoe “centipedes / along the coast of the peninsula / oars dipping in unison” (58), and mountain ranges are “a lizard’s spine / up the land” (54). Cross emphasises the structures, colours, and shapes of place, priming our mind’s eye for signs and symbols:
the island is sunrise red bursts behind the ragged range (54)
The structure of Islands mimics an island, its sparse end parts sandwiching a midsection densely striated with temporal events. Human history is “young, and not” (62), politically and ecologically repeating itself over centuries. Like a nation, Islands is communal yet personal, a “virgin / territory / to oneself” (66), an identity, a map, a trap, and a kind of sovereignty. We enter Part III, ‘islands,’ with this overview dawning as a “deep green rising” (62).
Here, the personal becomes transpersonal. Part III’s poems are tiny word-islands clustered on a sea of white space. Aiming a precise comma, Cross sums up his premise:
wreckages, float up pop onto the surface the sun carries the detritus wake of the boat island (71)
As the islands of Aotearoa “blossom” and “shatter / up” out of deep time (72), we recognise the debris of human actions, the “pop” of bubbles hinting that even islands are transient (71). In a heart-stopping moment, Cross simultaneously drops and strengthens his central metaphor by stating, “the island is not an island” (74). Earlier in the book, islands were prisons with “no obvious / way out” (57). Now, “seabirds glide between them” (74), mapping connection rather than isolation. Islands’ final poem is a single phrase, “the sea-coloured birds” (75). All foregoing stories fade into this glittering, monochrome image that visually clusters New Zealand’s peoples, animals, and landforms, as co-travellers on the oceans of time. Seabirds opened the collection; now they resolve it, with a luminous aftereffect. Islands will appeal to readers of topological and ethnological ecopoetry, Kiwis, and Kiwi admirers everywhere.
Polyp and Islands offer distinct contemporary perspectives on Southern Hemisphere ecologies. I have mind-mapped these collections in my own clusters of the human, non-human, and place. Perhaps the impulse to draw connections between self and environment, to cluster human stories together with those of other lifeforms, is the whole point of ecopoetry. Perhaps emulating non-human patterns, as Polyp and Islands do, will be key to human survival as we learn to combine siloed knowledge systems to redress our relationship with the planet.
