INSIDE OUTSIDE

Brian Turner

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.

Brian Turner is one of New Zealand’s leading poets. His first collection, Ladders of Rain (1978) won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, and his sixth, Beyond (1992), the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry. He was New Zealand Poet Laureate 2003-2005. His acclaimed work in other genres includes co-authorship of the autobiographies of All Black stars Josh Kronfeld and Anton Oliver, a biography of Colin Meads, significant contributions to Timeless Land and The Art of Grahame Sydney, and Into the Wider World: A Back Country Miscellany.


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.

 Pyjamas

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.