Jo McNeice’s debut poetry collection, Blue Hour, winner of the 2023 Kathleen Grattan Poetry Award, is a striking meditation on memory, mental health, and the ever-shifting nature of human relationships. Set against the beautiful landscapes of Te Whanganui-a-Tara, McNeice’s work oscillates between the intimately personal and the universally resonant, drawing readers into a space where past and present merge.
From the opening poem, Aro Valley, McNeice establishes a voice that is at once tender and observant, addressing the natural world as if it were an old friend. The poet’s deep connection to place is evident throughout the collection, where landscapes are gifted with personality and emotion: ‘The weeds tripping up / the fences, the flowers / tripping up the weeds. / The night about to settle / in for the night. / But pausing before / it closes the door.’ This interplay between environment and interiority recurs across Blue Hour, reinforcing the notion that the external world can serve as a mirror of human experience.
Themes of love, loss, and mental illness weave through the collection, often surfacing in fragmented recollections and sharp, unexpected imagery. The poet’s exploration of relationships, particularly their dissolution, is underpinned by an urgent desire to capture fleeting moments of togetherness. The titular poem encapsulates this bittersweet yearning: ‘Let us capture something / before the impenetrable / blackness.’ Here, McNeice’s skill lies in her ability to balance delicacy with directness, crafting poems that feel both lush and restrained.
One of the collection’s most compelling aspects is its structural and formal diversity. McNeice employs a variety of poetic forms and her engagement with the glosa, a form that integrates borrowed lines from other poets, underscores Blue Hour’s thematic preoccupation with inheritance—of language, experience, and artistic influence. The original lines interspersed with the borrowed creates a layered and textured effect, reinforcing the collection’s interest in repetition and revision.
McNeice’s engagement with fairy-tale motifs further enriches the collection. Echoes of Little Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel, and The Little Mermaid permeate the poems, with recurring images of wolves, trails, and enchanted transformations. These references, far from feeling derivative, are repurposed to explore contemporary concerns—mental health, violence, and personal autonomy. The poet’s use of these tropes suggests an ongoing negotiation with past narratives, a theme that aligns with the collection’s broader meditation on memory and identity.
Despite the collection’s singular-coloured title, Blue Hour is rich with colour. While blue appears intermittently, McNeice’s palette extends to purples, greens, and ‘buttery light’, imbuing the collection with a visual lushness that complements its emotional intensity. This use of light and darkness—literal and metaphorical—reinforces the collection’s overarching theme of liminality.
Judge Anne Kennedy remarked that Blue Hour is a book that ‘reveals more luminous beauty with each additional reading’, and indeed, McNeice’s collection rewards multiple engagements. Its carefully wrought language, formal innovation, and thematic depth make it a compelling addition to contemporary New Zealand poetry, solidifying McNeice’s place as a poet of remarkable insight and lyricism.
Reviewer: Chris Reed
Otago University Press