Victoria University Press -- $30
This substantial new collection by award-winning poet Brian Turner develops themes characteristic of his poetry. Love poems and elegies keep company with poems of satire, protest and metaphysical speculation. The book concludes with ‘Post-operative’, a raw and risky sequence written in the wake of major surgery. Ultimately, everything helps to map the contours of love, loss and longing that form the map of the human heart.
The publishers, and the poet, have kindly agreed to letting me reproduce several of my favourite poems from the book and they appear below.
Confidentially
My neighbour still nods
and says far out
so you can guess
what decade formed him;
another says way to go
which tells you a fair bit
about what TV shows
he’s wasted his time on.
Another’s confided she’s
looking for a way out
and her husband says
he thinks he’s going to
get the arse, nothing’s surer.
You could say that it’s a worry,
the place is falling apart,
mate, unless you’ve shares
in Prozac, in which case
she’s lookin’ sweet as.
Audible
The creek is in trouble,
troubled, its trickle
close to vanishing
in a bed of gravel.
A wish to be audible
is a fight for life.
In that sense
there’s little difference
between us.
A Lot
You’re not compelled to declare
your love for something, or someone;
just say you like it, or him, or her,
a lot; those who affect you most,
they burn your heart.
I wear my late father’s
red flannelette pyjamas
night after night in winter
when a fright of frost
sticks to the windows,
and is like sherbert
on the ground.
They’re
warm, these pyjamas,
and tonight I feel far older
than he seemed to be
in days when he was younger
than I am now.
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