Sleeping on Horseback

‘A hundred years are but a moment of sleep,’ writes Po, still riding. In her first collection, Frances Samuel leads us into the lives of characters we have not met before in New Zealand poetry. A man with a snorkel trawls fountains for coins; a vending machine produces a sailboat; a zookeeper frees all of his animals; we look for our double so that we can join the ark before it sails. Each step forward clears a path of snow, and contemplates the question ‘How do we get there?’ These journeys, surreal as well as everyday, are mapped with an exuberant imagination and intelligence.