James Robertson introduces Brian Turner

The poem
About Brian Turner
About James Robertson

I spent two months near the end of 1981 hitchhiking around New Zealand, after a year of work and wandering in Australia. I was 23, travelling alone and light, and I was simultaneously embarked on another journey – to discover the literature of my own country, which my education had declined to inform me existed.

A lot of hours were spent in quiet country places, or on quiet country roads, walking or waiting for lifts. I took the opportunity to memorise 'Tam O'Shanter' and other Burns poems, and I read constantly, among other things a battered old proof copy of Kurt Wittig's The Scottish Tradition in Literature, which I'd found in a second-hand bookshop in Wellington.

I'd been away from Scotland a long time and missed it, but I also found I didn't really know what it was I missed. I kept coming across places – especially in the South Island, Brian Turner country – so beautiful and unspoilt that I had to stop and think hard about why I wanted to go home. Something old-fashioned, rough-edged and unsophisticatedly intelligent about New Zealand touched me back then. I was very self-contained yet very open to the places I journeyed through, and the people I met were also independent yet astonishingly hospitable.

Place
Once in a while

you may come across a place

where everything

seems as close to perfection

as you will ever need.

And striving to be faultless

the air on its knees

holds the trees apart,

yet nothing is categorically

thus, or that, and before the dusk

mellows and fails

the light is like honey

on the stems of tussock grass,

and the shadows are mauve birthmarks

on the hills.

Brian Turner,

All That Blue Can Be

(Dunedin: John McIndoe, 1989)

Visit the Scottish Poetry Society website for the full piece on Brian Turner.