Incident Report

Incident Report is a stunning new poetry collection from Elizabeth Morton, one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s most inventive and accomplished poets. A visceral and exhilarating read, Incident Report is a finely wrought chronicle of emergency and rescue, and of love and miracles.

Morton wields language with power and precision. Her musically adroit lines carry the reader swiftly, and her fresh-cut images leave a vivid afterglow in the mind. Like the shadows cast by starlings flying over a road in Morton’s ‘A Dark Matter’, this astonishing collection disco-balls the ‘asphalt monotony’ of daily life. These are poems that ‘tally the toll’ of being a ‘budburst of a mammal’, in whose body cortisol and telomeres vie with memory, dreams and choice.

Incident Report is a rollicking existential journey through a dangerous landscape, holding on all the while to the ‘L of love by the scrap of its neck’.

Drive with me
through marshes and mangroves,
through the heat of love and rescue,
past the burnt halls and the wreck
of constellations loose and visionary.
—from ‘ON RAMP; Or, A User Manual for These Poems’