Description
Praise for Tom Weston’s previous collection, Only One Question:
If Allen Curnow was the stony and austere godhead of New Zealand literary modernism, then Tom Weston (along with his close contemporary David Howard) are tending to the altar, counting the mala beads, and ensuring the continuation of the elder’s example. It is something of a study, to observe how Weston is able to sustain the seriousness of the task — the poem-as-act-of-sacred-communion — without ever breaking down into didactic sermonising or self-consciousness parody.
— Michael Steven, Landfall Review
Weston is a master of abstraction, and our attempts to relay meaning occupy a large space of his work. Language is seen as a tool that can haul things into the world, but also affirm the empty and ineffable. Weston’s people are sometimes ‘speechless’, sometimes ‘holding candles and waiting for words to matter again’. There is a sense that language is a device with which we are at best flailing and incompetent. Weston asks ‘how do we speak and whose language is it’. Moreover, words can be wielded in an attempt to break with reality, to delude and to deceive.
— Elizabeth Morton, Booksellers New Zealand
