Your Secret Life: Poems by Harry Ricketts
by Harry Ricketts
HeadworX, $138
It used to be said there was no need to worry about what people would say about you once you left Hong Kong. You'd be forgotten before the ship left harbour.
Harry Ricketts taught in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Hong Kong during the 1970s and his earlier book, People Like Us, was published in Hong Kong by Eurasia in 1977.
Ricketts was a tri-culture kid, brought up in Hong Kong, Malaysia and England. Since 1981 he has lived in New Zealand, where he teaches literature in English and creative non-fiction at Victoria University of Wellington. Much of his writing from New Zealand has been published by presses there, with scant distribution in Hong Kong, but his biography of Rudyard Kipling, The Unforgiving Minute (1999), was published in London by Chatto & Windus.
Of his poetry, the Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature says: 'Ricketts' best are either deftly satiric 'light verse' ... or wry commentaries on the perplexities of love, marriage or parenthood.' Your Secret Life - his first full-length poetry collection since his selected writings, Nothing to Declare (1998) - is consistent with this description.