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“... Underneath a Mazda bulb sits Coconut Joe, head buried in Tracy chez les coupeurs de têtes, having an idea, brilliantly seeing why the quonset huts where Tracy sang went slowly down, gurgling, off Million Dollar Point: ‘Joe, Joe, Coconut Joe, walks around like an NCO ...”

“... A Tropical Voyage Trade mirrors for the chiefs’ faces, combs and soap are piled on deck. In two lines of sailor hats, the boatboys sing a native song to Ideal milk and bully-beef in shining tins, while underneath the launch the waves change places in a series, each with another one the same. Tess Trueheart with Tracy in a Plantation At a number of points across the slanted lines of smaller and smaller palms, her blonde hair curls into so many noughts ...”

“... In the 1760s the greatest gap in Western knowledge of the world – the Pacific – was plugged, in theory, by the great southern continent of Terra Australis, awaiting its Columbus. Within a few decades this continent had been exploded, mostly by its anti-Columbus, James Cook, and crumbled into a multitude of islands in a vast ocean, mapped, measured and ready for invasion by beachcombers, traders, whalers, missionaries, colonial administrators and, in their wake, historians ...”

“... good and evil effects of missions. The ‘literature’ of this theatre is the preoccupation of Neil Rennie’s Far-Fetched Facts. It takes him down awell-worn and, as he seesit, narrow path. Bernard Smith showed the way in two magnificent books, European Vision and the South Pacific, 1768-1850 (1960) and Imagining the Pacific (1992) – from some ...”

“... either person, still less the relationship between them. This happens, I’m afraid, with Neil Rennie’s The Cargo, 15 very short poems arranged so as to be ‘the first three parts’ of a supposedly longer work in progress. Rennie, I think, doesn’t mean to be a tease; his teasingness has less to do with a ...”

“... The cultural compendiousness of ‘Postwar British’ and ‘World’s End’, dedicated to Neil Rennie, both of which have something of Rennie’s anthropological intelligence. The deployment, for once, of a more formal vocabulary in ‘Going Round Afterwards’ and the fine elegiac sequence for Hugh ...”