poetry – Page 41

Tigers & Worms

March 1, 2011 Leave a Comment

Cy Mathews
Tigers at Awhitu, Sarah Broom (Auckland University Press, 2010), 80 pp., $29.95 The Worm in the Tequila, Geoff Cochrane (Victoria University Press, 2010), 95 pp., $25.00

Does lyric poetry spring from calm and contentment, or agitation and unease? Adverse circumstances and events can certainly provoke powerful creative responses; it is probably unsurprising then that the experience of physical or mental illness has resulted in many compelling literary works. Sarah Broom’s Tigers at Awhitu and Geoff Cochrane’s The Worm in the Tequila both emerge from such experiences, evoking and – eventually – moving beyond them in very different ways.
   Sarah Broom is a relative newcomer to New Zealand poetry (Tigers at Awhitu is her first collection of poetry; a scholarly work, Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, was published in the UK in 2005). Her book is divided into two untitled sections: the first part written before the author’s diagnosis of terminal cancer (which is now in remission), and dealing with a variety of lyrical and narrative subjects; the second written after the diagnosis. Many of the poems in the first section are cool and spare with vivid imagery and stand-alone lines used for blunt impact, while other somewhat denser poems establish a more prosaic pace. ‘Crusade’ is an especially powerful example of the first type, its opening question – ‘And I wondered what kind of a thing the soul was’ – leading, after six lines of rhetorical speculation, to the climax:
   Or the death rattle
   of a coin belt ripped
   from the waist of a dying man.
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Parish Moments

March 1, 2011 1 Comment

Robert McLean
Cornelius & Co: Collected Working-class Verse 1996—2009, John O’Connor (Post Pressed, Queensland, Australia, 2010), 144 pp., $25.00.
John O’Connor is a Christchurch poet who has had eight books of poetry published. His most recent book is Cornelius & Co: Collected Working-class Verse 1996–2009, a sizable (144 pages) selection of previously published and new poems that are more or less in keeping with the qualification of the collection’s title.

Is there irony in its tub-thumping title? The distinction between verse — often skating close to doggerel and to which is usually appended the qualifier ‘light’ — and poetry — assumed to be a far more serious proposition — amounts to one between low-brow ‘popular’ entertainment and high-brow diversions of the intelligentsia: not a realistic or clearly delineated division, but the tension generated by that division provides much of the energy crackling in these poems.

Whilst the poems in this book are derived from O’Connor’s lived experience – as a boy growing up in an Irish-Catholic household and parish; as a resident of the suburb of Addington; and as a taxi driver encountering smudged, damaged, or yobbish ‘characters’ – the experiences are treated with forensic detachment. There is a fierce and committed intelligence invested in these poems, which offer sharply-drawn characterisations, compassionate detachment, keen humour – and an uncompromising adherence to highly theoretical principles of composition that sometimes clash with or spark off the intransigent events on which they have been brought to bear.

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