SOURCE: A review of Strands, in World Literature Today, Vol. 67, No. 2, Spring, 1993, p. 452.

In the following review, Gadd praises the poems in Strands.

Keri Hulme is internationally better known for her Booker Prize-winning novel The Bone People (1983) and for her short stories than for her poetry. Strands, a collection of work of the past decade, seems intended to present her also as a poet worth noting—and it succeeds.

The sustained major work in the volume is “Fishing the Olearia Tree,” followed by a group of substantial poems, “Against the Small Evil Voices.” (The title “Deity Considered as Mother Death” captures some of her concerns here.) The collection ends with “Some Wine Songs,” considerably lighter and indeed so far out of kilter with the major poetry as to suggest that the publishers wanted to bulk up the collection.

Hulme employs an array of familiar contemporary techniques of impressionistic...