Incident Report is a stunning new poetry collection from Elizabeth Morton, one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s most inventive and accomplished poets.
A visceral and exhilarating read, Incident Report is a finely wrought chronicle of emergency and rescue, and of love and miracles.
Morton wields language with power and precision. Her musically adroit lines carry the reader swiftly, and her fresh-cut images leave a vivid afterglow in the mind. Like the shadows cast by starlings flying over a road in Morton’s ‘A Dark Matter’, this astonishing collection disco-balls the ‘asphalt monotony’ of daily life. These are poems that ‘tally the toll’
of being a ‘budburst of a mammal’, in whose body cortisol and telomeres vie with memory, dreams and choice.
Incident Report is a rollicking existential journey through a dangerous landscape, holding on all the while to the ‘L of love by the scrap of its neck’.