How to be Dead in a Year of Snakes

In his first full-length collection, Chris Tse pays `proper respect' to events of more than a hundred years ago, interviewing a tragic cast, singing with a chorus and laying ghosts to rest. The `gallery of lost names' to whose lives he bears witness includes the Chinese miners whose bones remained for decades far from home on the shores of the Hokianga; their countrymen and families; other various ghosts who wander or seek revenge; and - crucially - Joe Kum Yung, a Cantonese goldminer who for a hundred years has been trapped as a ghostly victim by his history, whose name is remembered because tied to another's, that of Lionel Terry who went out one Wellington night `looking for a Chinaman'. In poems of quietly polished, resonant language and deft imagery, Tse circles these events and the viewpoints from which they could be seen or told, then and now - asking who we should remember, how we should honour the past, and what we should take forward to the future. How to Be Dead in a Year of Snakes is a terrific, lyric, charged narrative - and an unusually expansive first collection.