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.