Dressing for the Cannibals Frankie McMillan (Sudden Valley Press, 2009) RRP $20. ISBN: 978-0-9864529-0-1

Keith Nunes
Kiwi writer Frankie McMillan's first book of poetry is brimming with wisdom and wisecracks. An International Institute of Modern Letters graduate, you may know her name through her first published works, The Bag Lady's Picnic and Other Stories which garnered widespread acclaim in 2001.

McMillan's poetry is whimsical; her delivery is without hesitation and the end product typically profound. It may drop off the mark once in a while but predominantly the book provides a steady trip down an attractive river.

She avoids the formal aspects of poetry and focuses on what she sees as the exploration of an idea.

McMillan handles the prose poem with aplomb contorting at times in mid-air and gathering herself before she lightly touches down. She said in an interview that "there are a number of prose poems in the collection, a form I find really exciting to work with".  ‘Dominion' is a fine example, with the poet opening up with both guns blazing: "One day my father stole the house. My mother stole it right back. Again my father stole the house and this time he took the front lawn as well."

‘Demolition' is hell-bent on entertaining you: "then Frank whatshisname followed by the glue sniffers and then there was us two or three if you count the dog".

‘Crossing' is a darling of a poem about sisters who once fought but now lean on each other with the one sister sending remedies and "a wooden stick to reveal the moon".

McMillan also likes to bring down the blues on occasion, as with the melancholy ‘Charlotte Jane' and the vivid ‘The Piano Learns to Swim'. Then she'll give you beautiful lines like these:

I have painted the walls
yellow, walls let the yellow
climb through

In ‘Apples' she twists and turns and says: "They don't know what to make of my mother who can never see a tree or a cloud without wanting it to be something else."

McMillan says of her work: "My poems are characterised by humour, accessibility, with an often faux naïf narrator who makes observations about how it is we are 'so mysterious to ourselves and to the world.' The poems are fictional but have an underlying emotional truth. They reflect my interests; theatre, folklore, memory, family and the peculiarities of being human." She says the collection of poems was prompted by a childhood horror of being eaten.

McMillan's first book of stories attracted this comment from a reviewer: 'This writing and these stories announce the arrival of a strong new voice on the New Zealand literary scene."

Her poetry appears in the anthology, The Unbelievable Lightness of Eggs (Hallard, 2006), a collection featuring the work of six New Zealand poets. In 2009 she won the Open Section of the NZPS International Poetry Competition. Sixty this year, she lives in Christchurch within biking distance of everyone and everything that matters - she teaches Creative Writing at the Christchurch Polytechnic and the Hagley Writers' Institute.

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