We're about to go on holiday for about ten days (the Gold Coast - mostly for the kids, but maybe, with judicious use of a babysitter for a meal out or two, and a quiet day on a nice beach between theme parks, we might have a proper good time too! Can't wait to see those boingy dolphins though, not to mention the stacked up waterskiers at Sea World... and some of those slides at Wet'n'Wild look pretty good...).

Anyway, to get you all chatting during this hiatus, I thought I'd put up James Brown's angle on poetry, which I must confess I held back from NZ Book Month because... well, just because. So sack me! (Today's my last day as web editor for NZ Book Month, and I'd like to introduce the lovely Dee Murch as my replacement – Dee was a founding member of LeafSalon, so it's nice to keep it in the family.) I'm sure most of you will have an opinion on James' choices... bring it on. That's him on his bike on the right – he's a mad keen cyclist and even has his own blog all about biking, here.

By the way: there are so many book titles in here, and I'm so rushed, and our blogging software is so not 4th generation, that just this once, I'm not going to put them all in italics. I'm sorry about this, but I just can't. When I get back from holiday I'll be so on to it. Over to you, James:

Why did I decide to do this? It’s only going to make people grumpy.

1. Milky Way Bar by Bill Manhire. You were expecting Baxter or Curnow, weren’t you? Ha – this’ll piss a few people off! When I first read Milky Way Bar I found it hilariously funny, then I read it again a few months later and thought it desperately sad. I learned that poetry could not only be both at once, it could be one and then the other, which really is a kind of magic. The three long poems – ‘Brazil’, ‘Phar Lap’ and ‘Hirohito’ – are superb.

I remember Geoff Cochrane once saying to me that he’d been re-reading Manhire and had concluded that his was the only truly unique voice to emerge out of the 1970s. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but Manhire’s voice certainly is wonderfully unlike any other New Zealand poet’s. These days it’s an influential voice too, but I still can’t think of anyone who really sounds like him. Also, Manhire’s voice is a movable feast, especially in his latest book, Lifted, which contains a complex mix of public and private poems, and often public and private voices in the same poem.

I still haven’t come to terms with Lifted. We need to talk about Kevin (that’s the title of a 2003 novel by Lionel Shriver, which is well worth reading.) Both Hinemoana Baker and Kate Camp have said on different occasions that ‘Kevin’, the book’s last poem, is their favourite and the key to the book - and others have also named the poem as one of the book’s best. So I feel slightly awkward about admitting that although I like the sonnet a lot, it’s not my favourite moment in the book. I can even isolate my problem to the very last sentence. It’s the big rhyme of ‘go’ and ‘radio’ and the certainty of tone at that point that are just too heavy for me. I fall right through the big O sounds. Oddly, I have no problem with the ‘show’ and ‘know’ in the two preceding lines – and I love ‘There are mothers and fathers, Kevin, whom we barely know. / They lift us.’

I also have trouble with the ‘dark furniture’ image. When I think of radios in poetry I can’t help but recall ‘Broadcast’ by Philip Larkin, which features ‘glowing wavebands’. The radio in ‘Kevin’ also starts off with ‘that dark, celestial glow’, but by the end there’s only ‘dark furniture’, meaning, I presume, that the radio has been turned off and gone dead. The radio could be read as a metaphor for an unfathomable afterlife - the ‘one far place’ where we all go after death. This works fine, but I can’t get away from a radio as glowing and alive, and, if it’s turned off, thinking someone will turn it on again, and if people have gone into its ‘the dark furniture’, then they’re inside waiting for the radio to be switched on, at which point the furniture will be no longer dark, and by this time I’m in such a muddle about whether I see the furniture as light or dark and the departed people near or far that final image is lost to me.

That mixing of registers in Lifted that I mentioned earlier rears its head in the way the name ‘Kevin’ sits in relation to the poem’s serious subject. Names, like all words, are not value-neutral or unencumbered, and the name ‘Kevin’ is not one I associate with serious discussions about death. Kevins fix cars. Try replacing ‘Kevin’ with ‘John’ or ‘Sue’ – solid, no-nonsense names – and see how the poem alters. ‘Kevin’ does something odd to the gravity of the poem’s subject, but I’m not sure what. Does it make the poem’s subject more or less serious, personalise it or undermine it? My difficulty is that it seems to do both.

My favourite poem in Lifted is actually ‘Unusual Film Idea’.

Unusual Film Idea

Along the corridor little lights always came on at the side.
He was carrying her photograph in one hand
and more or less dragging the child.

I find the poem’s flat tone completely devastating. Is ‘He’ being cruel to the child or are they both having to go and visit someone (‘her’?) under distressing circumstances? The casual cliché ‘more or less’ has never been so brutally employed. And where is the poem taking place? The snapshot is completely spooky, and suggests much more than its three lines … a novel or, indeed, a movie. Notice how silent the scene is too, which only adds to the creepiness.

For me, the key poem in Lifted is ‘The Ladder’, which seems to be about hope.

The Ladder

Too short to reach the roof,
too short to threaten important windows,

the ladder lies on its side
behind the house, out of sight.

The ladder lies in the grass,
a different grain in each of its rungs

(and wings on each rung
so where can you place your feet?).

And, as you can see, it is rotten.
Nevertheless, it longs to be lifted.

I like that, even in the midst of a serious poem, Manhire still finds room to play with the notions of perception (‘as you can see’). Oh, it’s rotten, yes of course we can ‘see’ that.

Another poem I really like is the found poem ‘Dogs’, which is made up of phrases, often about dogs, lifted from South Pole discoverer Roald Amundsen’s diary. It’s funny and tragic, and also contains moments of amazing poetry. I wonder if my liking it such a lot perhaps indicates why I struggle with the book as a whole, for the poem is vintage Manhire, whereas the other poems have gone somewhere new and I haven’t managed to find them yet.

2. Jerusalem Sonnets by James K Baxter. I might also have picked Autumn Testament. Initially I had Jerusalem Sonnets at number one and Milky Way Bar at number two, but then I thought, hang on, I’m being swayed by history here when I actually read and enjoy Milky Way Bar more.

I like Baxter’s easy-going voice and the sonnet form of seven unrhymed couplets. I like the concrete, everyday concerns and the way they ground Baxter’s arm wrestles with God. I like his humanity. I like his beard. Actually, I have no opinion as to his beard.

3. An Incorrigible Music by Allen Curnow. I could also have picked Trees, Effigies, Moving Objects, but I studied An Incorrigible Music at university, so ... Curnow is probably New Zealand’s foremost technical practitioner – his early sonnets are particularly dazzling. But it is his sequences that really allow his intellect full rein. An Incorrigible Music is an extended meditation on death, predestination, choice, god, epistemology, representation, violence, victimisation, sacrifice, and more violence. It moves between New Zealand and the kidnapping and eventual execution of Aldo Moro in Italy in 1978. Brutal, tactile and also deeply philosophical, this is not poetry for the people.

The two most revered New Zealand poets are probably Baxter and Curnow, and people tend to prefer one over the other. I used to be firmly in the Curnow camp, and in fact I wrote a glowing review of his last volume, The Bells of Saint Babel’s, for NZ Books. That issue ran a parallel review by Heather Murray dismissing the book. At the time I thought she’d misjudged his genuis, but the truth is in recent years I’ve found myself reading Curnow less and less, and now I think I’ve moved toward the Baxter camp.

I don’t think Curnow’s poetry has aged as well as Baxter’s. Curnow is a high modernist, and his poetry seems trapped in that period, whereas Baxter’s later voice resonates better today. The music of Curnow’s poems tends not to flow freely - it’s staccato, jerky and compressed. Again, some sort of impressive but unlistenable modernist musical composition springs to mind, one that that impresses with its technical virtuosity and intellect, but you’re secretly glad when its over. Ditto my current reaction to Curnow’s poetry.

Another reason I don’t tend to enjoy reading Curnow anymore is that I simply don’t care for his often gruesome, depressing subjects, which is basically what Heather Murray was also reacting against. I don’t like violence in movies and I’ve finally realised I don’t like it in Curnow. He saw the world as very fallen.

There’s also been a change in how I read – I now read for mostly for pleasure. When I first encountered Curnow it was as a university subject and he certainly benefits from being studied rather than merely read. But I’m not an academic – never have been – I’m a reader, so these days I’ve less time for Curnow.

One thing: Curnow, Baxter and Manhire are all endlessly quotable. I was trying to write something at Te Papa the other week about Pacific people in New Zealand and suddenly the opening lines of Curnow’s sonnet ‘Polynesia’ came into my head: ‘Surf is a partial deafness islanders / All suffer from’. I hadn’t quite remembered it correctly, but I was amazed that it was in there at all because it’s hardly one of Curnow’s well-known lines. I think it had stuck because it’s such a superb metaphor. I wonder if Curnow is our premier ‘coastline’ poet?

4. Come Rain Hail by Hone Tuwhare. A short book, only 24 pages, but every one a gem. Contains classics like ‘Rain’, ‘Flood’ and ‘Hotere’. I thought about his first volume, No Ordinary Sun, but the diction of many of its poems is a tad too operatic for me. Come Rain Hail eases off a bit. The thing about Tuwhare, hardly his fault of course, is that he’s been rewarded for later books that aren’t nearly as good as his earlier work. Still, belated recognition is better than none at all, I guess.

5. Summer by Jenny Bornholdt. See my blog on NZ Book Month.

6. Sings Harry and Other Poems by Denis Glover. This is one of the truly great sequences of New Zealand poetry. So why didn’t I put it higher up? Well, I first encountered it at university aged around 20, and I hated it. The reason: here was rhyming poetry about a swagman wandering the backcountry of New Zealand, and I, like most New Zealanders, was living an urban existence on the mean streets. The sequence just seemed too removed, old-fashioned and irrelevant.

It wasn’t until years later that I was finally ready to appreciate Glover’s musical, philosophical and seemingly casual achievement. The philosophy isn’t of the intellectual enquiry variety like Curnow’s, it’s more about the search for equilibrium with one’s mind and the world - and maybe a little transcendence if it should happen by.

But what really delights me is the sequence’s music. Glover knows just when to ditch the rhyme, just when to play and replay it, just when to pull up the rhythm and just when to stretch it out. As music the sequence is a virtuoso performance.

The Park

The river slower moved
And the birds were still.

Leaf and tree in silence hung
Breathless on the plunging sun.

Now came still evening on,
And suddenly the park was full of pedals,
Sings Harry.

This fragment doesn’t do it justice. You have to read the whole sequence, which, happily, is neither long nor hard.

7. South by Chris Orsman. Orsman’s diction is sometimes seen as being a bit fusty and old-fashioned, but what better tone in which to retell Scott’s doomed race to the South Pole (1910-1912)? South is one of the great – if not the greatest – New Zealand book-length poems. Progressing chronologically – and the pacing of the sequence is a perfect line of footprints – each poem takes you into some aspect of the expedition, with the point-of-view moving seamlessly from exterior to interior, utilising the varying perspectives of the third person and (only once or twice, I think) the first person. You are totally transported back to the heroic age and immersed in the minds of the adventurers. As the circles narrow, a sense of claustrophobia and, at the same time, vastness and hope of ascension rub together through extraordinary description and detailing.

The Age of Light

In winter’s depths he strains at midday
to see the meridian he imagines as light.

His face is blackened by the blubber stove,
and the small nova of acetylene

burns in the rank firmament of the hut
a rationed apocalypse. The polar night

completes itself in the flaring of a match;
he gathers all his powers now to read

the simple age of light – its absence
neatly accounted for, its advent

whitening in the deep-veined glaciers
on the further side of winter.

It’s an utterly convincing narrative, which bears out the saying ‘Fact is stranger than fiction, but fiction is truer’. Of all the books, films, photos, documentaries, and even Scott’s journal, about the ill-fated bid for the Pole, Orsman’s version brings you as close as you’re ever likely to get, short of actually going back in time. The book is also the only New Zealand poetry book since Hubert Whitford to be published by Faber and Faber.

Round about now I find my silly scheme starting to unravel because there are too many other books I really rate, but I don’t really know or care where they should be ranked. So, the remainder of my top 12 (yep, I can’t count) might include:

8. 100 Traditional Smiles by Anne Kennedy

9. Small Stories of Devotion by Dinah Hawken

10. Settler Dreaming by Bernadette Hall

11. Dia by Michele Leggett

And then there are all the others I was going to put in at number 12. So, in no particular order, here they are and I’d like you to go away and pick one from the following:

Salt Water Creek by Rhian Gallagher
Afternoon of an Evening Train by Gregory O’Brien
Beyond by Brian Turner
Homing In by Cilla McQueen
Tales from the Anglers Eldorado by John Newton
Birds of Europe by Andrew Johnston
A Box of Bees by Emily Dobson
The Late Great Blackball Bridge Sonnets by Jeffrey Paparoa Holman
What Happened on the Way to Oamuru by John Dickson
Seeing You Asked by Vincent O’Sullivan
Abandoned Novel by David Beach
Acetylene by Geoff Cochrane
The Pierrot Variations by Iain Sharp
General Motors Leigh Davis
Beauty Sleep by Kate Camp
Playing God by Glenn Colquhoun
The Commonplace Odes by Ian Wedde
Winter Walk at Morning by Iain Lonie
The Adulterer’s Bible by Cliff Fell
All Cretins are Liars by Anne French
A Girl Long Ago by Johanna Aitchison

If your, or your favourite, poetry book isn’t there, it’s not that I don’t like it, it’s just that maybe I haven’t read it! I love and respect your work and opinion. You were to be number 13!