Live Encounters Books-Reviews Volume Seven
November- December 2025
Slender Volumes by Richard von Sturmer
Spoor Books, 2024
Slender Volumes locates the cypress trees of Buddhist folklore in Onehunga and the teachings of the Zen tradition along its foreshore. Elaborating on kōans collected by poet-philosopher Eihei Dōgen, each poem fastens centuries and distances together to find insight in everyday things: seagulls on a handrail, insects drinking from a pan of water, sump oil glistening in a white bucket. Clear-sighted and compassionate, Slender Volumes recovers what it means to be intimate with our surroundings and to meet the particulars of our world with perfect curiosity.
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“Richard von Sturmer’s Slender Volumes is a collection of evocative, elegant and finely crafted prose poems; but it is also an epic about the progress of a soul; and a work of profound scholarship too. Here is writing which restores wisdom literature to its place in the centre of our endeavours and at the heart of our preoccupations.”
— Martin Edmonds
“Slender Volumes isn’t just profound – although it is – it’s funny, earthy, mesmerizing, warm, intricate. I read these poems wide-eyed with delight and wonder. On his journey through the material world, the poet shows us how every moment can be full of marvel and beauty; more than that, he makes it so with his exquisite telling. I do believe Slender Volumes is von Sturmer’s most miraculous work.”
— Anne Kennedy
“Illuminating, playful and delicious, each poem from Slender Volumes takes us to a different remembered detail in Richard von Sturmer’s storied life. Imbued with mischievous observations and whimsical side-eyes, everyday happenings are elevated into something more.”
— Renee Liang
© Richard von Sturmer
Richard von Sturmer is a New Zealand writer. He was born on Auckland’s North Shore in 1957. His recent books are the acclaimed memoir, This Explains Everything (Atuanui Press 2016), Postcard Stories (Titus Books 2019) and Resonating Distances (Titus Books 2022). In 2020 he was the University of Waikato’s writer-in-residence. He is currently working with filmmaker and musician Gabriel White as the Floral Clocks. They have recorded three albums: Desert Fire (2014), A Beautiful Shade of Blue (2017) and Gas Giant (2019). https://thefloralclocks.bandcamp.com/