Magnificent fancy scrapbook a delight

Otago Daily Times - Sat, 14 Jan 2012

SKEW-WHIFF
Poems, Peter Olds; Images, Kathryn Madill Otakou Press

Peter Olds lives here in Dunedin. His first love was drawing before writing became the main activity in his life from the late 1960s. After joining James K. Baxter in Jerusalem, he turned from song-writing to poetry. His poems are strong, direct, rich and dark.
Kathryn Madill, another local, joins lonely fragments of literature, legend and fairytale in her art. She has visited Antarctica with Bernadette Hall and helped illustrate her poems Settler Dreaming (VUP, 2001). Her pictures are imaginative, haunting, exquisite and intellectually tough.
All of this comes together in eight images and 10 poems in Skew-Whiff.
This expensive book betrays vulnerable depths, especially childhood, on the way to falling apart.
Olds knows how to make a good poem that has got little to do with bells and whistles.
Skew-Whiff is magnificent. It has to be at $250 with a press of only 100 issues.
Think fancy scrapbook. It works as both a welcome memoir for the devoted and a gorgeous introduction for the new, united in haircuts, hairpieces and knowing smiles.
"The Naked Lady" concludes:
... But her face was
young-looking, with black
eyes and eyebrows, and with red
paint on her lips. Her private
hair stood up like lamb's wool.
Then we looked at some greenstone
and Egyptian cows and took
off our shoes to go into the Maori
meeting house ... Now, when I
sit in the sandhills at St Kilda
and look out to sea, I can see her face
in the shafts of white rain.
Skew-Whiff is a dazzling concoction. It mostly hits the ground running in exciting directions. Olds' poems convey raw emotion, joy, terror, jealousy, loss - but in a refreshingly naive and straightforward fashion.
Madill's illustrations add integrity. She enjoys throwing around a few magical seeds.
The last copies can be obtained from Donald Kerr at the Otago University Library.

- Hamesh Wyatt lives in Bluff. He reads and writes poetry.