THE VICTIMS OF LIGHTNING
Bill Manhire
Victoria University Press, $30, pbk
Bill Manhire went to the Gore Public Library as a child.
Recently, he read his poems with Cilla McQueen and Brian Turner at the 25th anniversary of the Gore Art Gallery - the same building that used to house the library.
He might have worked for Victoria University since 1973, but his new book of poems, The Victims of Lightning, summons up his childhood.
The rich, hurried detail of "1950s" reads like Billy Joel's song We Didn't Start the Fire:
The Famous Five. The Secret Seven. Tarzan of the Apes.
My idea of Heaven. The empty sky.
Haere mai . . .
School, parents, the Moon are all a bit of a focus for Manhire, in his first book of poems since his excellent Lifted.
The dreamy feel of "A Lullaby" is really beautiful.
Another poem about the Robbie Burns statue in Dunedin dwells on perhaps younger days when Manhire was a student at the University of Otago.
Southland and Otago frosts appear in one of the 10 songs in part three of this wonderful book.
All these poems are strong - some are right up there with his best work. Manhire has always had the gift of making seemingly banal sentiments sound like essential truths. Remember the naked horse? This time around he also imagines a childhood in Ireland or being Peter Pan.
One of Manhire's favourite books is Enid Blyton's The Magic Faraway Tree.
She embraced that two-way traffic between the world of the everyday and the world of the imagination.
Manhire seems like a man focused on the future but draws more freely upon his distant past with heart and soul.
W. B. Yeats once said "A poet always writes of his personal life in his finest work, out of tragedy whatever it be, remorse, lost love or mere loneliness."
Spot the lonely little boy in The Victims of Lightning.
It has been way too long between books, but his timing and strength of commitment have not left Manhire.
Sixty years on, he seems to have waited until he was ready.
Selected Poems of David Mitchell
Eds Martin Edmond and Nigel Roberts
Auckland University Press, $34.99, pbk
The final poem in the exciting anthology Big Smoke: New Zealand Poems 1960-1975 was Nigel Roberts' "The List/for/David Mitchell".
This poem talks of a list made by James K. Baxter written on an envelope in a coffee bar in Auckland, three days before he died. Roberts and Martin Edmond got together to edit Steal Away Boy: Selected Poems by David Mitchell.
Mitchell is a poet, lover, political activist, cricketer, traveller and impresario now living in poor health in Sydney.
He literally rocked the New Zealand poetry scene in the 1970s and '80s.
One imagines a poetry reading being full of reverent silence but during Orientation Week, 1970, in the Auckland Technical Institute Hall, Mitchell released anarchy and chaos, with Alan Brunton and Russell Haley, as the packed hall at lunchtime yelled, whistled and stamped to the chorus of Haley's "billy goat gruff's song".
A couple of times Mitchell travelled to Europe, where he met his Danish wife, Elsebeth Nielson - and Bob Dylan.
His marriage ended with the 1960s, although he kept dedicating work to her.
His poetry is for the ear, rather than the eye.
Check out the lyrical beauty of "A Letter":
I am here my love
beneath an apricot sky.
Summer is a young girl,her voice is thick
in these green islands . . .
His Pipe Dreams in Ponsonby was bought and read by people who did not usually buy or read poetry.
Rather than publish another book, he set up Poetry Live! at the Globe Hotel, Auckland which ran every Tuesday night from 1980 to 1983.
Everyone came: Campbell (Alistair), Campbell (Meg), Edmond and Edmond, Eggleton, Ensing, Kemp, Kidman, Olds, Orr, O'Leary, Shadbolt, Smither, Stead, Tuwhare, Wedde; sometimes 20 poets a night.
Everyone except Allen Curnow and Sam Hunt, both of whom declined to appear.
Even Mitchell's teenage daughter, Sara, would sing sometimes.
Mitchell had an affinity with Elizabethan poets' preoccupation with masks and what may lie beneath them. He had a fear of time and used the foole's cap.
Mitchell enjoyed antique spellings of common words like delyt, grene, speke and werke.
He used rhyme well.
Many of his free-form poems sound like exploded sonnets.
Included in Steal Away Boy: Selected Poems are Mitchell's well-known "my lai/remuera/ponsonby" sequence, his ballad "Armageddon/Hokitika Blue" and the 10-page masterpiece "The Singing Bread".
The whole book is a vivid and frequently gorgeous reminder that David Mitchell is a talented poet.
When Big Smoke was launched in Wellington in 2000, Mitchell was invited to read.
He stepped forward, studied a page of the book, frowning slightly, for what seemed a considerable time.
And then stepped back, in silence and sat down.
That silence which might then have been deliberate, is now involuntary and almost complete. Mitchell can now no longer speak more than the odd word and communicates via gestures or brief handwritten notes.
Silence was always a salient quality of Mitchell's poetry: not the silence of absence or self-abnegation but one replete with the crackle of possibility, like the anticipatory or recollective pause before and after a lightning strike.
The court jester figure speaks in "Poem For My Unborn Son".
He concludes:
. . . Better
than chanting a mime
through your carousel years
flushed and stiff
like a red marionette
or your father at court
steal away boy.
This is striking poetry for all the world's disenchantments.
Fiona Kidman
Godwit, $36.99, hbk
Fiona Kidman was born in the same year as Mitchell, 1940. She has written more than 20 books, mainly novels and collections of short stories. Where Your Left Hand Rests is her fifth collection of poems.
It is a classy little book.
Kidman uses illustrations of embroidered linens and other Victorian gift antique collectables to separate her poems.
She talks of very concrete things: family, being a librarian and "Electricity":
. . . We did not foresee
pylons that strode over landscapes
carrying charges more powerful
than lightning into the blazing
cities of the world, or television
or dishwashers or hair driers or can openers
that did the work by themselves, or electric
guitars strumming, or the Eiffel Tower shimmying
when the French won the football
(or how it would darken when they lost)
There is a purity of spirit and tripped-out glee in Kidman's new poems.
She is so honest and irresistible: it feels as if she is sitting right next to you, in a small room bathed in twilight and speaking to no-one else.
Where Your Left Hand Rests is a lovely little book.
Glenn Colquhoun with illustrations by Nigel Brown
Steele Roberts, $34.99, pbk
In just over 10 years Glenn Colquhoun has produced five collections of poems.
The Art of Walking Upright won the first book of poetry award at the New Zealand Book Awards in 2000. His third, Playing God, talks of his vulnerability as a doctor.
He won the New Zealand Award for Poetry and the Readers Choice Award in 2003.
Still pushing himself, in How We Fell Colquhoun describes his 10-year relationship with his former wife.
He writes his poems about personal stuff, things that matter to him.
It is no different in this fifth collection, North South.
He imagines the northern gods of his Celtic heritage engaging with the atua Maori of the South.
He creates a new mythology: he brings to life the story of Tama, a child of the gods linked to Europe and New Zealand.
Handwritten and illustrated by Cosy Nook (Southland) artist Nigel Brown, the poems sprawl across the pages to clash, bend and fuse traditional Celtic and Maori motifs both in song forms and poetry.
The result is a brave book of poems which may challenge many readers' sense of culture.
Colquhoun delivers tight, powerful poems with plenty of range and emotion.
The Maori goddess of the dawn cries in "Hinetitama laments her lover, slain in a moment of frenzy by her cousin, Maui":
. . . The wind empties me.
I have no size.
When people stare they see my blood
mooching about, standing in lines,
waiting to draw water . . .
Colquhoun continues to be smart, inquisitive, articulate though a touch off in places.
There is a genuine pleasure to be had in the effort to grasp the meanings of these poems.
North South is ambitious and seems to work - Colquhoun is capable of great adventure and tenderness in expressing himself.
• Hamesh Wyatt lives in Bluff. He reads and writes poetry.
