At the White Coast

Description

If 'Mother won't come to us', New Zealanders must go to 'Mother' ...In alien yet strangely familiar territory, a place her ancestors 'got off', what must an expat in England do to survive? Score herself a bedsit, work in a pub, hunt up an office job - and keep an eye out ...Set on the cusp of the 1970s-1980s, Janet Charman's compelling new book centres on the disorienting experiences of a young woman newly arrived in London - squalid flats, temp work, ancestral visits and trips to the Continent. Charman has a laser-sharp eye for unsettling social cues, her outsider's vision of the city peristently challenged by encounters with an array of its remarkable inhabitants - distant relatives who stayed 'at home', welfare 'clients' and their social workers, fellow antipodean travellers - contacts inescapably marked by the claims and memories of that 'other' white coast: Aotearoa. In gritty lyric and biting word play, Charman's account of the OE experience reveals a passage hedged with earnest expectation and ripe with the black comedy of disillusion. This multi-voiced narrative sets out with telling details, a record of the secular pilgrimage of a single traveller from all the generations of Kiwis to alight 'at the white coast'.

Janet Charman's first collection of poems was published by New Women's Press in 1987 and she has since published five books with Auckland University Press, most recently the awardwinning cold snack, which won the Montana NZ Book Award for Poetry in 2008. In 2009, she held a visiting fellowship at the International Writers Workshop of Hong Kong Baptist University. In 2010 'at the white coast' was co-winner of the International Writers' Workshop (Auckland) Kathleen Grattan Prize for an unpublished sequence of poems. Charman lives in Avondale, on the border of West Auckland, with her partner and their two daughters.