Keri Hulme's Breath Poetics

Abstract

Breath plays a small, but important, role in the work of Keri Hulme. My interest in this essay is to consider what happens when Hulme's representation of breath is brought into conversation with the respiratory poetics of modernism, modernist anthropology, and planetary modernism to address Hulme's contribution to an Aotearoa New Zealand modernism. This conversation is played out in Keri Hulme's treatment of hau or ‘breath’. The essay argues that Keri Hulme, in her prose works the bone people (1984) and Te kaihau/The windeater (1986), develops a respiratory poetics: an interrogation of anthropology through experimentations with form.