His fifth collection of poems is called Warm Auditorium. This is a follow-up to his The Year of the Bicycle (VUP, 2006). In his late teens, Brown discovered he could be unashamedly moved by poetry. Certain lines made him laugh or cry and think and feel the world more freely than the world itself could.
"I Come from Palmerston North"
:... The Palmerston North Boys' High School yearbook is called
The Palmerstonian. But I do not think of myself as a Palmerstonian.
People from Gore do not think of themselves as Gorons.
I come from Palmerston North ...
In this latest slim volume of verse Brown is clever, humorous and exciting. He illustrates his love for his family and life. His goofy humour is quite contagious. Brown pens poems that are simple, restrained, yet border on something insane. Brown has always known how to craft poems, some that end with a ba-boom, others drift away. He captures mood effectively in his poems, many full of four-line stanzas. I enjoyed the tenderness of "My Oatmeal Granddaughter".
Walking home from school she flits
backwards, dallies sideways.
She stops to gentle seeds and snails,
her brow all over miles and furrows.
She is silence for hours, then bright shoals
fulfil her mouth and eyes.
Lost worlds are her room and hair.
I see her hugging the air, talking to Lego.
Loud noise and she surrounds her ears.
She runs mooing from the evening news, croons
'The Jolly Miller' over and all.
She is a shooting star, without friends or resistance,
but I firmly believe that in one future
some great instance
will shine from her.
Warm Auditorium is full of emotion, humour and surprise.
Cochrane looks backwards and forwards. His outlook remains bleak. The weight of the world has taken its toll, but there is nothing lacklustre about this latest collection.
Cochrane might sleep poorly, but he seems to be inspired so often.
"33:00 A.M.4":
The wind at night is new
The wind at night is black and unadorned
The wind at night is better than other winds
Step outside and taste it
Step outside and feel it on your face
The wind at night is clean
The wind at night is lucky
The wind at night is young, innovative
Step outside and taste it
Step outside and feel it on your face
The Bengal Engine's Mango Afterglow does eccentric angles on ordinary life. It is full of urgency and invention.
Cochrane would not have it any other way.
Kinsella injects himself into each poem. He uses his own experience, and political circumstances appear in some poems. He has spent 15 years gathering together these non-English poems. Removed from his latest collection Armour (Picador, 2011), radical politics, vegan ethics, sharp ecological and social critique still drift into this work. Kinsella knows how to achieve something magnificent, even if he can be a little brutal.
"The Woman In Love (L'amoureuse)" - Paul Eluard:
She is standing on my eyelids
And her hair is in mine,
She is shaped like my hands
She is coloured like my eyes,
She is swallowed by my shadow
Like a stone against the sky.
Her eyes are forever open
And she won't let me sleep.
Her dreams in the bright light
Make suns evaporate,
Make me laugh, laugh and cry,
Speak with nothing to say.
The Jaguar's Dream is full of fierce conviction.
Shaken Down 6.3 is a collection of poems and photographs that talk about the Christchurch earthquakes. Headstones have been revolving in the Lyttelton East cemetery. Fiona Farrell recently said "I haven't cried, but I don't feel that ridiculous glow of satisfaction at being unflappable anymore, or 'southern', and if anyone mentions our astonishing 'Canterbury spirit' once more, I shall spit". Holman takes all of this on board in his latest effort.
Shaken Down 6.3 has real bite that will be remembered by the reader. Poems need soul and sweat.
"sleep is the balm":
sleep is the balm
where forgetting happens
but we can't forget
with incense burning nightly
for the dead
when all the sticks are broken
and dreams are dreams of roads
where no one goes
you rise and nothing seems the same
what was is not
what is
to sleep now is to wake
in streets that won't
stop shaking
Holman speaks the truth with a raw, sometimes harrowing clarity. He is based in Christchurch and was involved at the Auckland Writers & Readers Festival in May.
"Tail-feather: a reflection", a final prose piece, rambles a bit, but Holman puts it well when he says:"A poem can send us back out into this troubled and marvellous world prepared to live more fully. There will surely continue to be all manner of suffering in this world, whether or not there is art or poetry - but without art, without poetry, such sufferings seem to me to be more meaningless and, worse, more powerful."
Shaken Down 6.3 is worth a look.
• Hamesh Wyatt lives in Bluff. He reads and writes poetry.
