P. J. K AVANAGH Helena Drysdale’s Strangerland: A Family at War
(Picador, 14.99) stays in the mind because of its mixture of history with the personal, which makes the history live. Pre-Mutiny military life in India (the Sikh wars) and a very different pioneer life in New Zealand (the Maori wars), seen through the real-life letters of a wife who followed her husband to both places, lov ing the first place, loathing the second. Drysdale’s concern for her puzzling fate makes her book read like a novel, gripping you the more securely because it is true.
Alan Brownjohn’s Selected Poems 19522006 (Enitharmon, £25) deserves to be bruited forth as loudly as possible. A poet so readable, interesting, witty, angry, descriptive, craftsmanly, should not need such salesman’s adjectives heaped on him. All one can do is implore any poem-shy reader to give him a try.
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