Johanna Emeney, a senior tutor in creative writing at Massey University, lives on a lifestyle block with her husband and a menagerie of animals. Her third collection of poetry, Felt, engages with an inhabited world. The title is the clue.

Relationships are felt through activated senses. Poetry is an emotional compass as the writer contemplates grief, addiction, friendship, family, damaged lives. Yet the handcrafted felt goat on the cover also suggests the textiles of an inhabited world are equally significant. Perhaps I see this as a book of touch, the way poetry has the power to touch us both as readers and writers.

Emeney writes with a sweet economy, her words fluent on the line, resisting the embellishment of metaphors or intricate rhyme. Such considered craft lets a clear light shine on the subject matter. The poem becomes a dwelling for story and anecdote, and you get to feel the people at the heart of the narration. I am reluctant to locate the poetry in either personal or fictional realms, but it feels real.

Several early poems are addressed to ‘you’, perhaps former students, who have ended up with drug addictions, and are resistant to an English teacher’s curriculum and secret hopes for brighter futures. The speaker’s fingers in Favoured Exception could neither untangle unkempt hair nor untangle unkempt living. The image moves you to the core:

Still, I have only an English teacher’s advice,

just as back in our old days I could not make my fingers

reach to untangle your hair, could not spell you out of trouble

with coded homework, nor keep you in school with

WISH YOU WERE HERE postcards from my classroom.

Another poem that underlines Emeney’s ability to affect the reader is Touching. Short lines build a palpable morning view of a field in fog, with two ponies looming like ghosts, before the scene shifts to memory. Perhaps because I loved Emeney’s mother poems in Family History (2017) so much, the arrival of the mother memory in a foggy field hit me sharply. Secondly the poem is an example of the arcs and bridges that render the collection pleasingly cohesive. Here the mother’s hand twisting her daughter’s hair links with the teacher’s fingers aching to untangled the troubled student’s locks. Fingers are tapping out Morse codes in both scenes:

and I am put in mind of my mother

her hand sweeping and twisting

my hair into a bun for ballet

gold rings busily clicking

their rich Morse love

and the scent of fresh lipstick

seconds after her breath

hits the back of my neck.

Several poignant father poems close the book. Serious illness, alcohol addiction and imminent death arc back to the young girls at the start. This is the inhabited world and it is both intimate and distant. It hurts.

Felt gets you thinking about poetry, how the poet canvases multiple experiences whether lived, imagined or felt, and finds the form and voice that suits each poem and herself. One example, Personal Space, becomes a metaphor for writing for me. The poem suggests women should clear a space for themselves on an annual basis. When I steal the intention of the final verse, it becomes a most invigorating manifesto on writing poems. Think of the book as a glorious arm-wide regeneration, the poems both stretching and contemplative.

She should clear a space

beneath the sudden worry of crowded floors,

the scatter of feet, the shock of doors,

run downstairs and shut herself in

the last room at the bottom,

then spin, arms open,

to see just how wide

she has forgotten.

Reviewed by Paula Green