Things to say and uplifting, upbeat poems

Michael O’Leary. Photo: John Girdlestone
Michael O’Leary. Photo: John Girdlestone

Poetry reviewer Hamesh Wyatt takes a look at new collections from David Howard and Michael O'Leary.

THE ONES WHO KEEP QUIET
David Howard
Otago University Press, pbk

Loved by fellow poets Kapka Kassabova, Cilla McQueen and Michael Harlow, Dunedin poet David Howard  has a new collection that  offers the sense of Howard’s favourite food, shepherd’s pie: imagine there is frost on the ground and all the windows in your house are steamed up, allowing you to draw on them.

Around for a number of years, Howard was a co-founder of Takahe magazine, has  edited important books such as A Place to Go On From: Collected Poems by Iain Lonie and has even dabbled in pyrotechnic displays for the All Blacks, Janet Jackson and Metallica.

Brian Turner once said of him: "Howard has his own ways of saying, and, something not all poets can claim, things to say."

Howard, whose last collection was the In-complete poems (Cold Press, 2011),  appreciates language and history. A portion of the ones who keep quiet  includes The Speak House (2014), which  talks of Robert Louis Stevenson’s final hours of life. It also has Howard noting our convictions are shaken by experience. More than 20 poems find Howard being direct. The souls of the departed are given voice. Yes, the ones who keep quiet for the longest are dead. But the dead are to be heard. A Catholic saint, a Marxist martyr, a boy with a tin drum ... they all break the silence. I particularly like when Howard talks of love, as in  They Meet When Destiny Is Still Chance:

It’s a sign, how the clouds collect
like pebbles on a beach, where
a small boy digs a hole with a scallop
and empties the sea into it.

They met when there was still a chance.

First love was remembered clearly, being
farther from death than any other.

They lived in the fairytale
they would live forever, it was destiny.

Go to sleep, she says, already
tired by his smile. The sea
disappears between their toes.

Known for creating atmosphere and texture, Howard zooms in on real people. A case in point is Prague Casebook, where he circles the character of alleged spy Ian Milner.

In fewer than 100 pages, Howard is sharp, vivid, forward-leaning and fascinating.

David Howard.
David Howard.
COLLECTED POEMS 1981-2016
Michael O’Leary

HeadworX, pbk

Michael O’Leary’s Collected Poems 1981-2016 is big and beautiful and has the feel of a scrapbook you’ve stumbled across.

The pages chart this Earl of Seacliff’s journey through Auckland, Wellington and Dunedin,  taking the  reader on an astonishing ride.

O’Leary is a poet, novelist, publisher, performer, bookshop proprietor and train enthusiast. He was  educated at Auckland, Otago and Victoria universities. Under the Earl of Seacliff Art Workshop, he has published work by a range of writers, alternative and mainstream. O’Leary’s  writing has appeared in  more than 30 periodicals and literary journals.

For a while, O’Leary lived at Seacliff and, with Peter Olds, opened O’Books in The Octagon and the O’oops Art Gallery around 1990. O’Leary completed a BA in English at the University of Otago. At the same time he was a creative writing tutor and an extra in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings films.

O’Leary, who has that wonderful gift of knowing any song from the 1960s and ’70s and can speak for hours on end using only song titles and quotations, offers an example of this knowledge in  While Your Guitar Violently Wails, which concludes:

Like John, you had become a single fantasy
Of someone’s over-rich, heat oppressed mind
Which sought to find the sense of utu
For your success and failure
George, the quiet one, almost eternally silenced
By an eighteen centimetre blade
Beware of sadness and the written word
Which comes back to haunt those who
Scoop it from the cauldron — who sew
The chords of discord in a song

This latest collection from O’Leary, comprising selections from more than 20 books, features more than 200 poems, many of them upbeat and uplifting. There might be no notes, no index of first lines, no index of titles, but there are still some wonderful sparkling ingredients. Many of them have been cooked up in Dunedin.Forget ageing gracefully. It is way better to age disgracefully. O’Leary’s Collected Poems 1981-2016 is one to own. This is a 35-year retrospective, the deluxe edition of Toku Tinihanga (Self Deception): Selected Poems (2003).

Last train past Clarksville Junction:

I met a young woman on the overnight train
She gave me a hand, I didn’t complain
A saucy encounter can sometimes ease the pain
Of loneliness and despair . . .

I still see her picture in the early morning
As she, mini-skirted walking, me yawning
Through the misty southern station, falling
Stumbling, towards town . . .

So this really is the end of the line
The train no longer goes late or on time
To Dunedin, Invercargill, it’s a crime
Putting an end to love ...

Footnote: In a recent review, Manifesto Aotearoa: 101 Political Poems (edited by Philip Temple and Emma Neale) was incorrectly described as the ‘‘brainchild’’ of Otago University Press publicist Victor Billot.

Add a Comment