Both authors are discussing about their experience in New Zealand except one writes about how she faces the poor reality of it being shattered away with new changes of the city as her memories were a dream of primeval beaches, whereas the other one writes about how her first sight of New Zealand comes to be a dismal and gloomy country in terms of first setting foot there as a refugee. Although both authors sets a melancholy tone about New Zealand when they arrive or as they return, both have differing approach of their writing. With using strong connotation and the use of diction, the first paragraph of the poem approaches the reader with a very gloomy tone as it compares New Zealand hills "are packed like cement", diction like"cemeteries lush with centuries of flesh" and "The people smile with missing teeth like hosts of a drunk party...clearly, the North has been here forever". Cemeteries lush with centuries of flesh, the choice of diction in this sentence was to intentionally reinforce an image in the readers mind of the North of New Zealand as a very old spooky place, shifting us away from an image of a bright and happy place. Comparing the people to a drunk hosts engages us to the author meeting the kiwis during her arrival in New Zealand as if they never gave her a express of kindness or respect. With hills like packed of cement sets to say that the mountains in New Zealand aren't as captivating.
Whereas Fiona on the other hand approaches the reader with a more enchanting and bright tone in her first paragraph with the use of her choice of diction. For example, she says "as the plane climbs up over Europe and watch it turn into a pristine place of rested hills and snow-topped mountains through which win the rivers..." the words like pristine, and snow-topped mountains gives out a bright tone as we as the reader create vivid imagery of beautiful landscape and snow, the word snow gives out a happy sense of emotion as snow reminds us of happy memories and Christmas movies.
Both authors approach the reader describing a country and the characteristics of it with a differing tone. Fiona talks about the mountains of Europe as "snow-topped" whereas the poem says that hills of North of NZ are "packed like cement".
However, when coming further down with Fiona's writing, we start to have a similar mood of how we felt when reading the poem. She expressed a similar tone of despondency with such choice of diction to form a melancholy tone, "that dream of primeval beaches scattered with driftwood...", "plains burned to a tawny hide in late summer.", "That dream she knows to be corrupted by reality: the beach is already threatened...
