Hamesh Wyatt reviews Mirabile Dictu, Just This, The Lustre Jug and Aloe.
Michele Leggott
AUP, $27.99, pbk
Sonja Yelich, Chris Orsman and Jenny Bornholdt lined up for the top poetry prize at the New Zealand Book Awards.
But new works by Michele Leggott, Brian Turner, Bernadette Hall and Diana Bridge also show the depth of talent we have here.
All these poets are not trying to prove anything to anyone.
They have all released at least five collections.
Best of all they can produce confident, polished poetry, done well for the masses to read, digest and enjoy.
Michele Leggott was until recently New Zealand poet laureate.
Mirabile Dictu (relating wonders) is her latest effort.
This is a generous book of poems.
It follows a year from light into darkness and a growing awareness of understanding, for Leggott is losing her sight.
A few years ago she edited The Book of Nadath by Robin Hyde (1999) and Young Knowledge: The Poems of Robin Hyde (2003).
In "shore space" Robin Hyde makes contact with people in the New Zealand literary scene:
. . . Robin Hyde gets off the bus in Milford
and down the road comes Wystan Curnow
fresh from a swim at Castor Bay
with D'Arcy Cresswell and Sam Hunt
they've heard about the plan
to sail for England and are here to offer help
with packing when the time arrives
Robin Hyde is touched . . .
Just like her last collection, Milk & Honey (2005), Leggott knows how to produce beautiful poems.
Her poems have both depth and uplift.
Brian Turner
VUP, $25, pbk
Brian Turner gives the reader 80 new poems in his latest collection, Just This.
He lives in Oturehua and Central Otago is where he finds the source and inspiration of the majority of these poems.
He loves wondering about lots of things.
Clouds, the moon and roadkill are not to be taken for granted. His whimsical imagery rings like alarm bells right through this new volume of poems.
"Sky":
If the sky knew half
of what we're doing
down here
it would be stricken,
inconsolable,
and we would have
nothing but rain
As always, Turner leads with his chin.
Full of tenderness and a sense of melancholy, his poems look backwards and observe things that are happening right now, too.
This collection is incredibly cohesive. There is a bit of philosophy, such as in the 20-part "Considerations".
There is the odd mood swing.
Just This is pure and simple. Turner makes poetry seem quite effortless.
Bernadette Hall
VUP, $25, pbk
In 2007 Bernadette Hall took up the Rathcoola Residency, which required her to live in southern Ireland for six months.
The first half of The Lustre Jug includes poems from this period.
Hall in her many previous collections reflects on her history, family and faith.
A teacher once told her many years ago as a teenager that she had a poet's soul.
Her new poems dig deep and are not too concerned about absolute answers.
I liked her search for beauty in the title poem:
there is a question that the sky
asks daily of the sea, something about faith
and unfaith, maybe,
a shirring of the lovely surface,
the silver slip, the embossed artwork
name for me, love, the parts of the flower
and I will tell you how beautiful
the women were when they were young
how they shone in the presence
of God immanent stirring within them, stirring
within everything, how their eyes shone . . .
The Lustre Jug is a warm, elegant little book.
Some of the poems are sprawling and trippy, others concise and cute.
For the most part, Hall hits her mark.
Diana Bridge
AUP, $24.99, pbk
Diana Bridge has lived all over the world. She has a PhD in Chinese classical poetry.
For many years she has written serious, moody poems.
Her new collection Aloe is no different.
The reader is guided through a landscape gazing at statues and staring at people.
A weary bird is not given a perch to rest on: "The Urge to Bury"
And if I gardened,
I would take unpotted absence
into my garden,
standing it there by the stalks of the rose
while I broke through the soil's embroidery, scraping
the wet scraps of memory
from head, heart and fingers
as I honoured the old urge to bury
trusting nothing but earth with my loss.
There is something profoundly sad about all these 50-plus new poems. People wait, others are betrayed. Bridge wrestles with the need to make sense of emptiness and loss.
It is good sometimes to be taunted by what we read.
All of these collections offer the good old themes of romance, heartbreak and mortality.
Michele Leggott, Brian Turner, Bernadette Hall and Diana Bridge are cool poets with real staying power.
They have the scope to move whoever they want with their verse. Their new poems are big enough and strong enough to take on the best the world has to offer.
Now that is something to celebrate.
- Hamesh Wyatt lives in Bluff. He reads and writes poetry.
