At the White Coast

Making landfall among the inhabitants of a gritty metropolis, these poems transport the reader from the white coast of New Zealand, the Land of the Long White Cloud, to the shores of another country and another time. Set on the cusp of the 1970s and 1980s, Janet Charman’s compelling poetry collection centers on the disorienting experiences of a young woman from the former British colony of New Zealand who has newly arrived in London—squalid flats, temp work, ancestral visits, and trips to the continent. With an eye for unsettling social cues, her outsider’s vision of the city is persistently challenged by encounters with an array of its remarkable inhabitants: distant relatives, welfare clients and their social workers, and fellow travelers. In gritty lyric and biting word play, this account of the overseas experience reveals a passage hedged with earnest expectation and ripe with the black comedy of disillusion.