The Venetian Blind Poems by Paula Green

Paula Green’s The Venetian Blind Poems is a work of rare intimacy and resilience, a collection born from illness but populated with clarity, beauty and connection. Written largely during her treatment for a life-threatening blood disorder, these poems chart both the harsh physical realities of hospital life and the imaginative leaps that allow survival. The title image of Venetian blinds is apt: the collection filters the world into fragments of shadow and light, revealing the texture of life when pared back to its most elemental moments.

The book is arranged in two parts, reflecting Green’s time in hospital and her gradual return home. What might initially seem like a restricted vantage point becomes instead a rich imaginative territory. A hospital room, seen through Green’s attentive and poetic style, contains its own shifting landscapes: the hum of air conditioning, the measured pace of nurses, the trickle of water from a glass that feels as monumental as climbing a mountain range. These details accumulate into a chronicle of illness that avoids sentimentality while foregrounding the dignity and courage required to endure it.

Character, in a poetry collection, is often refracted through the speaker’s voice, and here that voice is both vulnerable and tenacious. Green depicts herself as patient, observer and dreamer, a figure simultaneously grounded by physical pain and lifted by imaginative flight. She positions her mother, friends, and the wider community of poets and readers as part of this characterisation too: their cards, words and acts of care become living presences within the poems. In this way the collection gestures beyond the solitary sickbed, becoming a meditation on interconnectedness.

Stylistically, the poems are characterised by brevity and directness. Many are short, untitled fragments that accumulate meaning when read together. Their simplicity is radical rather than slight. A few lines can capture exhaustion, delight, or anger with piercing effect. Images are drawn from both the everyday and the dreamlike: a snail on gravel, jars of zucchini, underwater visions, or the ache of a wound. These create a rhythm that mirrors the cycles of pain and healing, of contraction and release.

The significance of the collection lies in its honesty and its refusal to separate art from life. Aotearoa New Zealand poetry has long valued the interplay between personal testimony and social conscience, and Green stands firmly in this tradition while also extending it. Her work demonstrates how poetry can serve as both a coping mechanism in extremes and as a gift to others, opening up difficult experiences with generosity and clarity.

The Venetian Blind Poems is not a book about illness. Actually, that’s not true, it is. But it is also about survival, gratitude, and the sustaining power of language. Green has created a collection that feels fragile yet enduring, like light fractured through blinds: patterned and partial, but providing illumination in darkness all the same.

Reviewer: Chris Reed

The Cuba Press