Rage against the machine

New poetry collections examine human intimacy, AI and nature, with delicacy and power.

- BY NICHOLAS REID

SICK POWER TRIP by Erik Kennedy (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $30) Erik Kennedy is a two-fisted satirist in the tradition of Roman poet Juvenal or 18th-century Jonathan Swift - no holds barred. The US-born Christchurch poet hints at social complaisance in his poem Individualistic Societies. Loneliness Studies satirises our human inability to get on intimately with other people. There is deep irony in The Health Benefits of Winter Sea Bathing. As for the collection’s title, it comes from the poem I Like Rich People, but I Couldn't Eat a Whole One Myself, strongly mocking the idea that super-rich people are different from the rest of us. There is much more where that comes from. But if it seems that Kennedy is deadly serious about everything, it’s worth noting he can sometimes be nostalgic or even whimsical. He's nostalgic in seeing hippiedom as harmless nonsense in Self-Defining Hippiedom Discourse or, in Bildungsroman, concerned with growing up. As for whimsy, there is the jump of imagination in seeing moths and butterflies as if they are airplanes (Magpie Moth vs Monarch Butterfly). All this shows that although Kennedy is a skilled satirist, he is capable of writing in different tones, both angry and cool.