The Blue Voyage and Other Poems is a new collection by Anne French - elegiac in tone and confident in execution. A more comic initial section (by noted New Zealand regional poet 'William Butler Smith') leads into a section of thoughtful but vivid sailing poems and then a number of elegies, laments and funeral songs from French's 'black notebook'. The final section voyages to Korea and includes some loose translations of poems by modernist Korean writer Han Yong-un. In their considerations of remembrance and writerly acts, these 'translations' aptly pick up themes introduced in the book's first three parts and round off the book 'Waiting for the ringing of the bells announcing daybreak, I put down my brush.'