NEW ZEALAND BOOKS
Moth Hour
Anne Kennedy (Auckland University Press, $25.75)
In 1973, at a Guy Fawkes party in Wellington, Anne Kennedy’s 22-year-old brother Philip suffered a fall and died. It was clearly a shocking event that deeply affected her parents and all their seven children.
Philip had been troubled with epilepsy and alcoholism, but also had an immense spirit and – like Kennedy herself – a poetic gift. At the time of his death, it’s understood a volume of his verse had been accepted by publisher Alister Taylor. One of Philip’s poems, reproduced here as “The Theme”, forms the starting point of this collection. He would have been a teenager when he wrote this extremely accomplished poem, in which a trapped moth contemplates the imminent end of its short life.
After her brother died, Kennedy listened over and over to Beethoven’s : 33 short pieces for
