The Farewell Tourist

Pushing against the boundaries of what poetry might be, Alison Glenny’s The Farewell Tourist is haunting, many-layered and slightly surreal. In "The Magnetic Process" sequence, a man and a woman inhabit a polar world, adrift in zones of divergence, where dreams are filled with snow, icebergs, and sinking ships. Their scientific instruments and observations measure a fragmented and uncertain space where conventional perspectives are violated. In a series of histories—of the Atmosphere, of the Honeymoon—footnotes reference vanished texts. By turns mysterious, ominous and evocative, they represent connections to an obscured narrative of disintegration and icy melancholy. Bill Manhire, judge of the 2018 Kathleen Grattan Award, has written: "There is an elegance and poise and care in the language of these poems, an unobtrusive mastery and ease in their cadences and rhythms. Here is writing so close to the sound of how our speech usually arranges itself, and yet set with a hard delicacy that makes it quite something else—memorable, direct, focused to the movement of how the poems present both thought and feeling." 

Alison Glenny was born in Christchurch, and currently lives in Paekakariki. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Victoria University of Wellington, a postgraduate certificate in Antarctic Studies from the University of Canterbury, and has taught creative writing at Whitireia New Zealand. Her work has appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, and online.