Dear Neil Roberts by Airini Beautrais

Airini Beautrais just won the Acorn Prize for Fiction at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. As such, there is an ever-growing list of reservations on the library copy of Bug Week & Other Stories and many book shops have sold out of the collection.

But Bug Week isn’t Beautrais’ first rodeo: she’s a well-established New Zealand writer with several poetry books to her name. One of these is Dear Neil Roberts, a book of poetry – or maybe more aptly described as a book in poetry. Like Bernadine Evaristo’s popular novel Girl, Woman, Other, Dear Neil Roberts is written in a compelling free verse that creates a reading experience more akin to prose than poetry. The poems centre on Neil Roberts, who in November of 1982 caught a bus to Whanganui with a backpack full of gelignite and blew up part of the Wanganui Computer Centre, inside which new technology was (controversially) revolutionising data surveillance in New Zealand.

Beautrais was born in Whanganui six weeks after the bombing, and her connection to Roberts and near-obsession with mapping his last moments and his impression in the community is eminently relatable at a time when our morbid fascination with true crime documentaries and podcasts is nearly all-consuming.

Some of the poems are constructed solely from headlines and newspaper articles about the bombing,

lending a multitude of voices to Beautrais’ exploration of the bomber. Really, though, this isn’t a book about a bomber – it’s a book about the New Zealand of the 1980s and of the present day; about the blurry line between history and narrative, between protest and being a pariah, about the stories we tell about our country and the ones we don’t. It’s about anarchy, it’s about Whanganui (not usually a literary location), and the human quest for understanding. And all of this in 60 pages. Beautrais implores you to think about these things in so few words that you could finish this book in an afternoon (or your lunch break, as I did).

A very worthwhile read while you wait patiently for everybody else to return Bug Week.

Posted by AM

Catalogue links:

Dear Neil Roberts

Bug Week & Other Stories

Girl, Woman, Other