Feeding the Gods by Scott Hamilton

Photos by Kendrick Smithyman

ISBN: 978-1-877441-44-8

rrp: $29.95

Scott Hamilton's second book of poetry takes us back to the strange yet strangely familiar territory he began to map in his acclaimed debut. In these poems the tyrannies of linear time, Cartesian logic, and geometric space are overthrown, so that a Japanese U boat surfaces in Kawhia Harbour, Hongi Hika attacks twenty-first century Auckland, Ulysses comes home to a South Pacific Ithaca, Ozymandias is reborn as Hosni Mubarak, the Australian Outback fills with water, Philip Clairmont escapes from a police raid by stepping into one of his paintings, and the author returns to the South Auckland of his mispent youth.  

Hamilton (left) is known as a social scientist and a political commentator as well as a poet. His study of the British historian and politician EP Thompson was published by Manchester University Press in 2011, and his weblog readingthemaps.blogspot.com has attracted more than two hundred thousand readers over the past three years. In 2010 Hamilton published an annotated edition of some of his hero Kendrick Smithyman's poems, and Feeding the Gods is illustrated and partly inspired by photographs that Smithyman took on his journeys through New Zealand.

Last night I dreamed that history was correcting itself. A huge hand lifted houses off the plain, as though it were clearing the board after a game of monopoly. Cows swelled to the size of hot air balloons, and drifted away over the Firth of Thames. The eels made themselves into question marks, as their ditches ran like mountain streams. In the emptied fields kahikatea got slowly to their feet, stretched their branches, and shook themselves dry, like the resurrected dead on Judgement Day, or swagmen after a kip. All those straight roads were rolled up like barbed wire. I looked down, and saw both my legs dissolving into the cool forest air...

Praise for other books by Hamilton:

'In a world where the burden of thought becomes lighter and lighter, Hamilton's literary loads have a weight that reminds us of just how much the human mind can carry.'

       - Chris Trotter

                                      

'Conundrum, confrontation, deconstruction, axiom: this is a book laden with possibilities...'

        - Siobhan Harvey, reviewing To the Moon, in Seven Easy Steps in Landfall

'Enormous fun...Those who know the Reading the Maps blog will recognise the house style: erudite, engaging and engaged, witty, occasionally rambling.'

       - Dougal McNeil, reviewing Private Bestiary at Nae Hauf-Way Hoose

'Edward Thompson often needed opposition...it was like grit in the oyster...All those seeking an introduction to this turbulent figure need look no further than Scott Hamilton's Crisis of Theory.'

      - Penelope Corfield, for Reviews in History

Feeding the Gods - by Scott Hamilton
Published by Titus Books with assistance from Creative New Zealand rrp: $30.00

Publication 28 November 2011

Phone / fax : +64 9 4204763
Email: titus@snap.net.nz


Book launch:


Sunday Nov 27th
Objectspace Gallery
8 Ponsonby Road, 3pm-5pm

Introductions by Michele Leggott
and Paul Janman

Readings by Bronwyn Lloyd
and Scott Hamilton