Harry Ricketts
Selected Poems by Geoff Cochrane (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2023), 239pp, $40
Before you come to the poems themselves, the late Geoff Cochrane’s Selected Poems is front-loaded with a short foreword by Fergus Barrowman, followed by a forty-page interview from 2003 between Damien Wilkins and the poet. This might sound like a risky, even alienating, move, but it’s not. Cochrane gained a loyal, almost cultish readership for both his fiction and his poetry, yet, as he admits in the interview, he never became ‘a mainstream author’, never became widely known. This remains true, and the interview will help to attune the unfamiliar reader to what one might call ‘Cochrane Street’ and will remind those already acquainted with the work of that street’s distinctive features and ambience.
Here are a couple of examples. When Wilkins—an expert prober—mentions Cochrane once claiming that ‘being born in New Zealand’ had been ‘something of a disaster’ for him, Cochrane instantly reaffirms the contention: ‘An unqualified disaster’, he fires back, adding that ‘one was saddled with living in a backwater’. By 2003, as Cochrane must have been well aware, this was definitely the wrong thing to say (as uningratiating in its way as the great cricketer Martin Crowe remarking a decade or so earlier that his favourite restaurant was in a small village in Italy and not the fish’n’chippy in Dannevirke). Later on, Cochrane observes: ‘I like to think of myself as the preeminent Wellington poet but no one else has noticed it so far.’ So, at once intensely displaced and intensely local. That’s a very Cochranesque stance, one worthy of the early twentieth-century Greek poet C.P. Cavafy, with whom Cochrane can sometimes bear comparison. Elsewhere in the interview, Cochrane describes himself as ‘a broken-down drunk and a lapsed Catholic’: again, it’s a characteristic self-definition and one in which he is implicitly likening himself to nineteenth-century French poètes maudits, such as Baudelaire, Verlaine and Rimbaud.
It’s no surprise then to find the poems shot through with a deep Romantic streak, the gleanings and gleamings of a solitary life deliberately lived on the urban edge, dedicated to the art. And the art itself is devoted to the capture of ambiguously epiphanous moments in the present and to distilled memories of walks on the wild side in a treasured, unrecapturable past. The snapshot and the vignette are Cochrane’s forte. The typical Cochrane poem—and, read in bulk as here, you come to realise there definitely is such a thing—is a bricolage of loaded lines, couplets, triplets, which at their best offer jewelled, baroque flashes of observation, perception and feeling. A quick list chosen almost at random:
asterisks of rain fall audibly
the hallucinated cat skips and skids
the swish and sizzle of the airport’s wet tarmac
But these are afternoons / as numinous as graves
All summer was a gala Aztec noon
The snide sirens dive and the rain catches fire, / but what of the Bengal
engine’s mango afterglow?
Night snaps itself together.
I wasn’t able to build a readership. And that slow-motion failure was like a slow,
protracted mugging.
Mammoths in blue meadows.
It’s a hedgehog, a long one, / blondly whiskery and purposeful of stride— /
a senior looking cove.
My melting moment tastes of garlic
I try to craft a thing as big / as a matchbox, as explicit.
That’s almost a Cochrane poem in itself, and the last couplet from ‘Postcard’ might stand as a prescription and encapsulation of his poetic technique: a haikulike preference for compression and immediacy plus (as Wilkins points out) the suggestion of ‘a concealed part’. Poem after poem—with their resonant details about the weather, the harbour, the smells, particular streets, pubs and cafés—gives support, even now, to Cochrane’s claim to be ‘the preeminent Wellington poet’ (although Lauris Edmond would give him a run for his money).
The poems, especially the later ones, return again and again to a sense of disappointment and failure, particularly that ‘slow, protracted mugging’ of failing to ‘build a readership’. ‘Analgesia’ keeps the realisation at bay, just—‘I amount to something, yes, / as I almost failed to do’; ‘God and Other Worries’ tacitly acknowledges it: ‘Nevil Shute. Hammond Innes. Alistair MacLean. / Were popular authors back in the 1960s’, as does ‘Andropause’ with its repetition of the title of a once much-read and admired Frederic Raphael novel:
There are no glittering prizes.
One sobers up and knuckles down and so forth,
But there are no glittering prizes.
(That apparently insouciant ‘and so forth’ is very Cochrane.) ‘Late in the Day’ is more direct, though ‘the matchbox’ still seems to hold something back:
My writing life has been
a series of defeats.
Soft defeats.
Invisible defeats.
The sense of failure was clearly real enough: ‘The tone of the work is never despairing but perhaps one senses that the man might be,’ as Cochrane guardedly admits in the interview, adding that it has often been his ‘sense of humour’ that has ‘saved [him] in a lot of situations’. The humour is certainly there in the poems, but so is something close to existential angst and ‘despair’ and a kind of vanity.
Of course, from a different point of view, disappointment, failure and despair can themselves be enormously rich veins for writers to tap. ‘Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth,’ Philip Larkin famously told the interviewer who naively asked him whether he really saw life as ‘about unhappiness, loss, a sense of missing out’. It’s a position that Cochrane’s poems, taken as a whole, seem to exemplify and endorse. They are full of a kind of ‘negative buoyancy’, appropriately the title of a short sequence about how Cochrane finally gave up the grog.
The humour—Cochrane talks in the interview of writing as ‘a complicated sort of fun’—is usually of a sardonic and/or half-self-effacing kind, often hovering above, behind and between the lines, as in the poem called ‘Cochrane St’:
The dark side of The Warehouse.
An outpost of the RNZAF
and Fulton Hogan trucks behind wire mesh.
In Cochrane St, in Cochrane St,
the gulls and sparrows play,
but surfers and dog-walkers tend
to go the other way.
As Wellingtonians will know, Cochrane St exists as located above, but the poem is as much a cryptic, semi-whimsical self-portrait of the poet, complete with his own ‘dark side’ and personal ‘wire mesh’, not to mention the neat, fending parody of Glover’s well-known lines about Plimmerton. Cochrane doesn’t often rhyme or use traditional forms, but a villanelle like ‘The Lich-Gate’ shows how metrically adroit he can be when he chooses, creating a stained music, almost Dylan Thomas grand:
So, as Neil Young sang his hurricane of need
In the lit and brittle bottle shop replete,
My life was mine as coins are brown and few
And the undertaker’s fattened roses blew.
By contrast, ‘Little Bits of Harry’ shows Cochrane at his most extended and experimental. Here he uses a series of minimalist shards to adumbrate a thirty-three chapter, thirteen-page verse novel, whose central figure (like the Fisher King or the character in Auden’s The Orators) has a ‘wound’ that is both literal and symbolic. For some, this gungy, grungy, mean streets saga, which ends with Rubin shooting Harry up and then kissing his ‘dubious shoulder’ in order ‘to seal and heal it’ may be the highlight of the entire collection, and I might have thought so myself once upon a time. Now, I’m much more struck by ‘Whispers’, a poignant twelve-part elegy for Cochrane’s father, where the jagged lines, clipped expression and jumps of thought sketch a mostly unspeakable grief. Struck, too, by the later poems in which he imagines a modern-day Bashō who ‘hangs with Sting and Moonbiscuit Smith’ and ‘On a wonky old typewriter, / … rides through rain toward a ruby smash.’ In ‘The Last of Bashō’, the identification with the self-isolating old poet seems more pronounced:
Bashō alone and walking some high path,
Bashō alone and climbing the concrete steps to heaven,
A flask of gin in his satchel.
A flask of gin and a spring roll gone cold.
I took part in a shared launch-reading with Cochrane in his later years. As per the inside back-cover photo, the ubiquitous beanie and grey, straggly beard were in place, a roll-up no doubt in his pocket for afterwards. His delivery was quiet, subdued, but quite hypnotic, as though you were eavesdropping on his thoughts. He had grazed his knuckles coming into the venue, and I found myself fixated by the trickle of blood on his fingers, slowly making its way towards the tightly clasped microphone—the microphone I would be holding in just a minute or two. A kiwi Bashō, battered but unbowed.
HARRY RICKETTS is a literary historian, poet, reviewer and editor who has published over 30 books, including The Unforgiving Minute: A life of Rudyard Kipling (1999) and Strange Meetings: The lives of the poets of the Great War (2010), and the poetry collections Winter Eyes (2018) and Selected Poems (2021). His most recent book is First Things (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2024), a memoir.
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