This Paper Boat

In This Paper Boat, poet Gregory Kan traces the life and written fragments of Robin Hyde, vivid with imagery and impression – the tide pool at Island Bay and its shrimp, the driftwood and crushed lemon leaves. He listens to the stories of his parents and of their parents, the eels and milk, frangipani trees and barbed wire of their childhoods. He remembers a jungle of his own; he searches for a friend gone astray; he finds ghosts. Entwined as narrative but reft with fragments, this book examines the public and private rituals of institutions, martial and medical, and of communities, families and individuals. With the irreparable fractures in identity and material, time and space, the author discovers a world driven by its incompleteness and constructability. A ‘paper boat’ is a fragile but hopeful vehicle in which to voyage towards change and forgiveness.

Gregory Kan is a writer based in Auckland. He completed an BA at the University of Auckland and an MA in creative writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters, Victoria University of Wellington. His first manuscript, a series of poems, was shortlisted for the Kathleen Grattan Poetry Prize in 2013. Kan’s most recent series of poems, ‘A holding apart of air’, features in the catalogue for the exhibition what is a life? by the painter Kim Pieters, at the Adam Art Gallery, Wellington. Kan’s work is featured or forthcoming in literary journals such as brief, Hue & Cry,otoliths, Percutio, Sport and Turbine. Kan was also featured in – and gave the name to –Paper Boat: Moments in the Life of a Book, a short film directed by Alex Mitcalfe Wilson. His essay Borrowed Lungs was included inTell You What: Great New Zealand Nonfiction 2015.