Turner takes a wider view

Poet, writer, angler, conservationist . . . Brian Turner's new book, Into the Wider World: A Back Country Miscellany, gets to the heart of matters, writes Shane Gilchrist.

Brian Turner likes to fish.

There are a variety of reasons why.

These include friendship, fun and its potential flipside, folly.

Further down the order, and certainly less so now than when he first picked up a rod, there is the prospect of food.

Yet, though the ability to land a fish lends the activity credibility, it is not really why he goes.

For Turner, fishing has as much to do with Henry Thoreau as it does trout; the former's thoughts on the "art of sauntering" and the latter's elusive beauty coalesce as justification for hours or days spent in the bush, tussock lands and backblocks of Southern New Zealand.

Simply put, it's a way to get away.

Like trout, the truth often escapes the angler.

Turner enjoys the bluster and the "bullshit" of a sport in which some hold dear to the concept of a tally, of one-upmanship; he has done it himself from time to time.

"There's plenty of fiction in there," he says, pointing to a copy of his new book, Into the Wider World: A Back Country Miscellany, which is published on Friday.

At nearly 500 pages, Into the Wider World is an extensive anthology of essays, columns, articles and poetry, bound together by Turner's love of wild places and spaces.

Fishing is just one of the topics.

The benefits of walking, of taking one's time, are celebrated, alongside the arcane art of duck calling; elsewhere, motorcycling is touched upon, materialism derided as a product of wider social dysfunction and friends held dear (those deemed to be fools less so).

"I did want to write a lot about where I've gone and why I've gone and what fishing does for you and to you.

"But I needed a vehicle, really, to write about environmentalism, New Zealand's environmental record, what we do in and to nature.

"I also wanted to write about socio-economic changes in New Zealand in my time. I tried to thread all that in there."

Turner (64) also writes of his distaste for those who dress impression as fact.

Thus the observational details of a recent two-hour visit to his Oturehua cottage to discuss his book, lifestyle and thoughts will be kept brief.

It is late morning and the day is cold, grey, wet.

The Idaburn, which flows behind a stand of recently topped pine trees at the back of the property, is a muddy mustard, swollen but not threatening.

Inside the house, Sibelius is playing, but the music is turned off so as not to intrude on conversation or tape recorder.

Apart from Turner's open and generous responses, the only other sounds are the occasional question to change tack, the crunch of teeth on cracker and the rare rumble of a vehicle along the main drag of the Ida Valley town.

Turner accompanies his words with a direct gaze that invites, rather than challenges, conversation.

Asked to sum up his writing style, he pauses briefly before choosing "candour".

Reflection and rumination follow close behind.

"[Irish poet Seamus] Heaney said his writing was a mix of his roots and his reading - that's very true of me . . . One is also looking for clarity, illumination, trying to illuminate things for others.

"I also try to write entertainingly about stuff that is important to me."

Into the Wider World has been two years in the making, though some of the accounts go back further.

Turner, having decided it was about time he did something with his various backcountry musings, rewrote and expanded them.

Some started out at 800 or 900 words.

Now they are twice as long and "contain all sorts of stuff that wasn't there in the first place".

Turner didn't want to take his readers in a straight line.

"Digression is often so much of what is of interest," he explains.

Which takes us back to the "art of sauntering", as defined by Thoreau, the 19th-century American writer and philosopher.

The antithesis of the concept of productivity, it values outer and inner exploration, pastimes others might consider a waste of time.

That is also part of the book's point.

"It goes against the grain in a way," Turner says.

"It seems to me we are becoming increasingly driven by the wrong things and that as a people there is so much unease and disease and social dysfunction that you need to ask yourself a few questions: are our goals - or the buzzword of the day, aspirations - and ambitions all screwed up? "I've always been interested in the need to simplify things.

I've actually tried to put forward my ideas as to what's going on in us, in me, that is good and not so good . . .

That last essay in there is on the pleasures of walking; the first one is about some of things I get out of wandering around and looking at things in this region, in the Maniototo."