By Frances Edmond. Published by Otago University Press, 2022. (NZD 40). Reviewed by Cecily McNeill

Frances Edmond’s account of her sometimes tempestuous, though always loving, relationship with her famous mother New Zealand poet Lauris Edmond, is deeply insightful. Frances is the second of Lauris’s six children. In Always Going Home she gives a sometimes blushingly candid account of family life and probes hitherto unknown areas of her mother’s life.

Poetry moved Lauris in her 50s from “exist[ing] only insofar as her family needs her to be there” to being a person in her own right. Early poems were bright and joyful though later, on the advice of friend and poet Alistair Campbell, she wrote of her pain — principally from the death by suicide of her fourth child at 21, but also from the breakup of her marriage, the decline of her husband’s mental health and schism in the family. Clearly Frances has her mother’s gift for writing and draws on her role as a frequent sounding board for Lauris’s issues.

Lauris’s drive to write is inspiring for women of a certain age. It will appeal to lovers of New Zealand’s landscape and history, of poetry and of the vicissitudes of family life.

Tui Motu Magazine. Issue 287 November 2023: 27