Shouting Secrets at Trains

The book is a collection of reflective and often poetic short pieces that explore memory, identity, and the quiet emotional moments of everyday life. Moving between personal narrative and observational writing, Messenger uses imagery—particularly trains and travel—as a metaphor for transience, missed connections, and the passage of time. Across the work, narrators grapple with: unspoken thoughts and private confessions fleeting encounters with strangers the tension between movement (leaving, escaping) and stillness (remembering, longing) The recurring idea of “shouting secrets at trains” captures the human impulse to release inner truths into the world without expecting an answer—a symbolic act of catharsis and anonymity. Rather than following a single plot, the book builds a mood-driven exploration of introspection, where small moments accumulate into a broader meditation on how people carry their stories through life. Nicholas Messenger Born in 1945, NICHOLAS MESSENGER is a lifelong poet and story-teller, painter and illustrator, who grew up in New Zealand, in the Bay of Islands, and has travelled and worked in several countries, in Latin America, Europe and Asia. He has been a seaman, security guard, demolition worker and various other things. For many years he was a teacher of science, languages and art in high schools in New Zealand, and latterly, for nine years, taught English, in three different regions in Japan. His mountains are those of the West Coast of the South Island, where he was a team leader in Search and Rescue, but he has climbed those of the Andes and far and wide in Japan. He has a son and daughter, and currently lives with his second wife, Seiko, in Hokitika in New Zealand. A poet from childhood, he published his first volume of poetry while at university in Auckland in 1965, and has read his work in Peru, France, England and New Zealand. He won the Glover Award for poetry in 1978. His poetry has been published regularly in Landfall magazine, and more recently in thirty-odd other literary magazines in print and on-line. His plays have been performed by school students, and his play, “The Stowaways”, was short-listed for the Polka Play for Children award in the 1980’s. He has had one-man shows of his paintings in Brittany in France, and in Greymouth and Westport in New Zealand. Very Good: Almost like new