Brian Turner has always written about where he lives - coastal Otago when he lived in Dunedin and, since he moved to Oturehua in the Ida Valley in 1999, Central Otago.
"Since I moved up here, I've written scores and scores of poems that I've set here or that arise out of my wanderings and musings and reflections on this part of the country," he says.
His latest book, Elemental, is a collection of poems linked with Central and written over several decades. Some date back to his first published volume, Ladders of Rain (1978) and others were selected from hundreds that have never been published.
Over that time, although his writing has become more sparse and simple without being simplistic, he says, most of his concerns and themes have remained the same - love, longing and loss, whether for people, places, relationships, landscapes, ways of life and other things.
"I wanted to celebrate this region and my love of it," he explains.
"The poems are full of particulars about places and things and my sense of the numinous and my reverence for the world around us and everything else - it's far more than just humans who live here.""I think it's the duty of a writer to be a dissenter and to take part in the discourse on socio-political issues.
Although there's not a huge amount of that in this book, it's implied a lot of the time - it can't help but be implied."
The book is about belonging to a place and the need to find a place we can call home, he says.
"I think a lot of New Zealanders have trouble with that because of where we live geographically and we are always being urged to or tempted to go elsewhere in order to discover more. I have mixed feelings about that."
Unlike many New Zealanders of his generation who looked overseas for excellence, excitement and inspiration, Turner (born 1944), says that by the time he was 20 he had become convinced it was likely we lived in a place that was as fine as any - and maybe better than most places elsewhere - and he wanted to explore it.
"I started reading voraciously and discovered New Zealand poetry in my late teens. When I look at my library, I bought almost every volume of poems that was being published at the time, and a lot of fiction as well - nowadays there's a plethora. It's exploded."
He discovered a lot of New Zealand writers grappled with the issues he'd been exploring; Bill Pearson, Curnow, Baxter, Glover, Ursula Bethell were all writing about our place. They were a bit on the fringe, but then all good writers are a bit, he says.
"Implied in all of this was that New Zealand art and literature was always second rate compared to elsewhere, and I've never believed that to be true."
He believes people confuse regional with the narrower concepts of provincial or parochial.
"I'm greatly interested in wherever I go, but I always think someone who's a nowhere person is very lonely," he says.
"I've been away a lot, in part for work and also through sport, but I always believed over the decades - to the point where it's a total conviction - that it is our duty to do our best by where we come from and where we live."
He believes the idea that humans are entitled to control and use everything around them, and that resources are limitless, is unworkable - "neo-liberal contagion", he calls it.
"I'm interested in stopping the rot and encouraging people to dig deeper into where they are - look at what they've got and protect what remains of what they've got, and work with it rather than just chew it up.
"Why is it that we need more and more? Why do we hold on to the belief that infinite growth is possible in a finite world?"
As a child he was taught to distinguish wants from needs and to realise that rights and freedom brought responsibilities and duties, he says.
"No, increasingly in my lifetime, everyone feels entitled to, and wants everything and more and more, and we are dying under our own waste. I don't know how much future humans have really got on this planet."
It's ironic, he says, that he and other artists have made people aware of Maniototo and Central and the beauty of the region, and so attract people from elsewhere to it.
In past years he's seen flight from the North because northern regions are not as appealing anymore, and it's usually related to an excessive amount of what's called growth, he says.
FORETOLD (for Vincent and Helen)
There's a warm breeze blowing down
off the mountains
now that most of the snow has gone.
There's a song somewhere
in the hearts of every man and woman
with the heart to sing.
There's elation born of relief
and the return of home and grace
in the flight of a hawk over Rough Ridge.
There's beauty in the unruffled
olive green and grey feathers of silver-eyes
feeding on sugar on my schist stone wall.
There's rivers and streams that are
quieter again and sheep and cattle
whose stoicism never falters.
There's the feeling exile's over,
and that, for all its limitations,
what's foretold has barely begun.
WHAT IT'S LIKE
When someone asks you to explain
what it's like where you come from
you say you're still finding out,
and it's not because you enjoy being
vague, or smart-arse, a sophist
if you like, it's because it's true.
This morning frost then fog like smoke
from a damp wood fire, then the sun
breaking through the lamé-like patches
until there's not even bandannas
left on the hills, and order's restored:
blue sky above incandescent snow.
• Elemental: Central Otago Poems, by Brian Turner, is published by Godwit.
The Otago Daily Times has 10 copies of Elemental to give away. To go in the draw, simply answer the following question:
What is the name of Brian Turner's first published volume of poetry?
Send your answer along with your name, address and daytime phone number to: "Elemental Competition", Response Bag 500010, Dunedin, or email playtime@odt.co.nzPlease put "Elemental" in the subject line.
Entries close on August 29.
Hear him
Hear Brian Turner talking and reading during the Otago Festival of the Arts, on October 11, as part of the "St Paul's at One" series.
