Shadow Play

Norcliffe professes not to be a confessional poet; nevertheless he freely acknowledges that places and people served as prompts for the poems. New Zealand based, Norcliffe is well-travelled and his poems have international resonance. Placing Shadow Play with one other poetry collection as a finalist for the annual international Proverse Prize in 2011, the judging panel (reviewing entries with no knowledge of the writers) found an expert hand behind a wide variety of well-wrought poems on a range of topics, pleasingly interwoven with literary allusions. "Though the 'ordinary world' most of these poems inhabit is rich with the familiar—ATMs, case managers, vindaloo—what James Norcliffe finds there is far from typical. And when he turns his considerable imagination up a notch, setting a giraffe on the Russian steppe, say, or exploring the largest statue of a strawberry in the world, the results have the surprise and gleam of the truly extraordinary. Shadow Play is a treasure chest of fresh, insightful work."—Don Bogen, poet and editor of the Cincinnati Review, USA."James Norcliffe is part bar wag, part trapeze artist, and every bit the literary raconteur. He wields his imagination like a spot welder, spraying out glowing trails of hot sparks. And yet so much in these pages happens in slo-mo, in fractured memory. There are poems for cartographers and window washers, personae poems for Hamlet, Alice in Wonderland, and sadistic Empress Dowager Cixi, love poems for books, ATMs, and vindaloo. But his great poem for the Icthyosaurus -- "not one centimetre / of human history in the / kilometres of its eyes" -- exposes the slinky sinister undertow at work. Suicide, heart attacks, suicide bombers, and auto da fe suck us in. Norcliffe pokes and prods the reader like a forensic tech and in the end his poems leave spatter patterns."—Richard Peabody, poet, novelist, and editor of Gargoyle Magazine, USA.