James Norcliffe
Lyrical Ballads by Bill Manhire (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2026), 136pp, $30; What to Wear by Jenny Bornholdt (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2026), 72pp, $25
Lyrical Ballads, Bill Manhire’s latest collection from Te Herenga Waka University Press, is his first in six years. Not surprisingly, then, it is a generous collection: 136 pages and, as we would expect, a most engaging read. The title, as we might also expect, is at once disingenuous and somewhat mischievous. The poems are not at all ballads as we would usually define them: metrical poems that tell a story and are often designed to be sung. Nor are they lyrical in the conventional sense, although often at odd moments—usually towards a poem’s end—Manhire introduces a snatch of singing rhyme.
Moreover, the title appropriates that of one of English literature’s most celebrated collections: Lyrical Ballads by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, first published in 1798. The book has become a touchstone of the nineteenth-century Romantic movement. Where Manhire’s collection pays homage to its predecessor probably lies in Wordsworth’s famous preface, a credo for Romanticism that poetry is best represented in the language of ‘men speaking to men’ or, to paraphrase in less gendered terms, in the language of ordinary people rather than the highly ornamented ‘poetic’ language of the time.
The opening poem exemplifies this. It is ostensibly a poem of welcome to the book, but also to an occasion: ‘Come on in!’ The first-person plural suggests the bonhomie of the host while indicating several guests. The voice is clearly that of spoken English, at once confiding and gently challenging: ‘Who is feeling brave today?’ Like so many of the poems in the book, it is compressed. Just four short couplets.
Once welcomed, what do we find? Bill Manhire, of course. His inimitable voice pervades the collection’s five numbered sections, including the two long sequences ‘The Tobacco Tin’ and ‘Tell You What’. Each comprises short pieces—24 and 28 respectively—and ‘short’ here often means extremely minimalist: often a single line or two.
‘The Tobacco Tin’ gathers short anecdotal pieces marked by whimsy and, at times, surrealism, typically ending with wry rug-pulls and non sequiturs that lend an overlay of strangeness. The poems are ostensibly random, although sometimes there are echoes and revisitations. In the opening poem, a grandfather steals a child’s first smile and secretes it in his old tobacco tin, which he buries in a clearing in the bush. The tobacco tin and the grandfather reappear in a later poem, ‘I Always Approached’:
He gave me his old tobacco tin. He said if I opened it I
would be in serious trouble. Of course I did open it, a few
days after he died. Just some rather sad old nails
These poems, especially the second, prompted memories of my own grandfather giving me his old tobacco tins—Melrose, Desert Gold, Kauri—but, as far as I remember, he never stole my smile, although I did use the tins to keep screws and nails in. The two poems demonstrate the slippery way the poet moves from the fantastic to the mundane. The tobacco tin is at once a repository of magic (a first smile) and a repository of the ordinary (sad old nails).
The other sequence, ‘Tell You What’, comprises 30 or so pages but, as mentioned, a number of the poems contain only a few words. The shortest, and arguably the cheekiest, contains only two. You cannot get much more minimalist. The title: ‘You Don’t See Ditches Much These Days’; the poem: ‘do you’.
The colloquial expression ‘tell you what’ is an opening gambit in conversation. Here, unlike the more anecdotal ‘The Tobacco Tin’, we anticipate opinions, and by and large that is what we get, although many of the pieces in this section also adopt a singsong rhyming pattern. There is, too, a bittersweet quality, a sense of time passing, of memories and the inability to remember, as in the poem ‘Missing’:
The names for clouds.
For the Auckland cousins.
All the bits of a church.
The section’s title poem is a series of five couplets, all but one rhyming, and most comprising little observations of the past. The rhymes give the poem a Stevie Smith-like flavour:
In the 1950’s all the boys had big ears.
Those were embarrassing years.…
Raewyn keeps in touch.
I never liked her much.
All of this is very entertaining, and that entertainment is to be found throughout the three sections that wrap around the two sequences: poems that vary in tone, style and topic even as the voice remains unmistakably Manhire.
Wordsworth’s preface to Lyrical Ballads also includes his famous definition: ‘Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity’. There are not many powerful feelings in Bill Manhire’s Lyrical Ballads; he is far too much of a wry ironist for that. However, one poem, ‘Gaza’, stands out powerfully and emotionally:
The dead boy tries to open his eyes.
He wants to see the world he is leaving.
But there is nothing to see here,
nothing and nothing, and anyway he is gone.
His parents held him while he died
but they are both dead, too.
Or he held them, no one remembers.
It has been a slightly longer wait for Jenny Bornholdt’s new collection What to Wear, following 2019’s Lost and Somewhere Else. Her new book is not divided into sections and comprises 44 poems—like Bill Manhire’s, they are spare and often skinny—although one poem, ‘Poem with a Hole in It’, extends to seven pages. This is an intriguing piece in which short linking narrative episodes describing how a council drainage excavation interrupts day-to-day life are interposed with single-line lists of random words, mostly nouns and adjectives, as if transcribed from magnetic letters on a fridge door or perhaps from a Scrabble board.
Day-to-day life, or artful domesticity, has always been the bread and butter of Jenny Bornholdt’s work. Here, as ever, it is full of the droll moments, wry asides and unexpected turns that make her poems so satisfying and enjoyable. At the same time, there are rather more shadows this time, and more foreshadowing. Nostalgia is more elegiac.
In ‘Forecast’ we are warned of what is to come. It is not entirely comforting:
… We go to the beach
and are hurled about
by the sea’s mighty
might. We tumble
and fall. We were
a long time ago
and now we are now.
The moving on of friends, health issues, and an awareness of time’s ever-passing are often noted. This passing of time is even more explicit in the penultimate poem, ‘Portrait’, which is suffused with a sad resignation:
… I am a
tired woman
of sixty-four
with a crook back
and a dicky
ticker. I cannot tell
if the man sings all
the goodbyes or
all the good guys
or if it even matters.
The final poem, ‘Illness’, provides the collection’s title. It exemplifies the minimalism of so many of the poems. Small tweaks to colloquial expression give the poem a sharp edge, and the closing question carries a resonant sadness:
She’s up
but not
to much.
Every limb
unknowable.
unstable.
She’s up, but just, just
hanging on. But what
to wear?
Many of Bornholdt’s poems are windows through which she allows the reader to peer. There are occasions and events closely observed with that ‘perfected attention’ the American poet Robert Kelly defined as poetry. The private is made public through the names of people she knows but readers do not:
Judy in the wading pool,
Colin too, with Alan
and Amala … (from ‘Swimming’)
Occasionally a given name is also a gift, leading to a (very amusing) poem. This is the ending of a poem describing the shared experience of putting up with endless muzak while waiting for an answer:
a young woman answers: Hello, my name
is Miracle, how can I help you?
Bornholdt’s humour is very much to the fore in the two prose poems that follow, ‘Mail’ and ‘Talk’. The first appears, at first, to be an anecdote regarding misdirected mail, but it follows a logical and slightly surreal progression to a very funny resolution. The second, centred on a trip to Bunnings, riffs delightfully on the talk involved in such an expedition.
As with Manhire’s Lyrical Ballads, Bornholdt’s language in What to Wear is clear and accessible, with figurative language and overtly ‘poetic’ tropes largely avoided. When she reaches for an analogy, however, it is often startlingly apt:
Our lives like
bad knitting … (‘Craft’)My heart, bitter as
old lettuce. (‘Heart’)
And in ‘Plum’ the entire (very brief) poem builds towards a double figure of speech:
Why wear socks
when your days
are numbered.
Like plums falling
from the tree, frequent
as minutes.
These two collections are very welcome additions to each poet’s canon of work. Bill Manhire and Jenny Bornholdt are distinguished figures in our literary landscape, and these collections once again demonstrate their craft and imaginative reach.
JAMES NORCLIFFE has published twelve collections of poetry, including Dark Days at the Oxygen Café (Victoria University Press, 2016), Deadpan (Otago University Press, 2019) and Letter to ‘Oumuamua (Otago University Press, 2023). His collection of selected poems, A Day Like No Other, has recently been published by Otago University Press.
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