Just This: Poems
By Brian Turner
()
About this ebook
The poet's ongoing love affair with his Central Otago home lies at the heart of this rich and compelling new collection that explores the politics of relationshipsand relationships themselves. Through a combination of people and place that gives the poems color and humor, the volume also examines friendship, politics, death, and the machinations of the modern business world. The mountains and lakes of the central South Island have a strongpresence in the imagery,while wry observations of people in that landscape movethe collection far beyond the confines of simple landscape poetry.
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Just This - Brian Turner
JUST THIS
BRIAN TURNER
For my son, André
Acknowledgements
Grateful thanks to the New Zealand Listener, Otago Daily Times, Quadrant and Sport, in which some of these poems previously appeared; and to Gilbert van Reenen for the cover photographs.
Contents
I
Epistemologies of Place
Improving for the Worse
What It’s Like
Goodbye Uncle
In a Sponsor’s Tent
Wind
Wind and Stars
August, Ida Valley
Snow in September
When
November Snow
Foretold
Full Moon in November
December Drought
East
Just This
Honestly
Put Down
Moving Stock
On the Road to Wedderburn
In the Hill’s Creek Cemetery
Between Shingle Creek and Fruitlands
Shapes of the Wind
Theatre Country
Humpty Dumpty
Deserts, for instance
Mercurial Michael in the Maniototo
Red Tractor
Blue Herons in the Evening
Some Basic Facts
Sky
Last Outing
Fisherman
II
In a South Dunedin Garden
Journey
First Day of School
Joy
Like Father, Like Son
Father and Son
Fear
Open Road
North Dunedin
Farewell
A Wry Big Bloke
Precursors to Sleep
Something That’s Yet to Come Your Way
Sailing to the Is-Land
Libraries
III
Chances of Revelation
IV
Unfashionable Suggestions
Lifestylers Anonymous
Documentaries about Tomorrow’s World
Shareholders’ Meeting
Gilt Edge
Pawns in the Game
Basic Instincts
A PM in the High Country
Up High
High Society
Hunkered Down
Homecoming
V
Gryphon
High Windows
Umbrella
Just About Complete
Considerations
Relationship Services
Celebrity
Levity
Liberty
Aren’t We All
Hereafter
Flutter
Enduring Love
Morning After a Storm
Matukituki
Backwards
Such is Life
Tool Kit
The Earth is Enough
We can be said only to fulfil our destiny in the place that gave us birth.
William Hazlitt in ‘On Going on a Journey’, 1822
A person’s life purpose is nothing more than to rediscover, through detours of art, or love, or passionate work, those one or two images in the presence of which his … heart first opened.
Albert Camus
I
Epistemologies of Place
There’s a side to beauty
that is sadness enduring.
There’s a belief in beauty
that’s peculiarly universal
while unique in itself
to this punter, or that.
It’s more the idea
than the actuality
of this place, not who
had the idea for it
that becomes a reality
previously unimaginable.
First there’s the perception,
then the journey towards
understanding that comes,
you’re told, with empathy;
and, finally, it’s the where
you know that refines
the who you are. It’s then,
you could say, landscape’s
indifference in itself
mirrors our impermanence,
has no awareness of the dramas
which, paradoxically, heighten
and enhance the sense of the
numinous in nuance and hue.
In other words, you choose
what it is that makes for piety
and pleasure, and obligation,
and how you measure such,
and what is meant by home,
and why, or whether
you believe, before
your time’s up, that
this big, unloved, untidy
unwalled room is it.
Improving for the Worse
I come from New Zealand.
Most people don’t know where it is,
or what it stands for. Good.
Nor do most New Zealanders,
if they ever did. Sad.
All of us are islands, entirely lost,
pretending we are not.
What It’s Like
When someone asks you to explain
what it’s like where you come from
you say you’re still finding out,
and it’s not because you enjoy being
vague, or smart-arse, a sophist
if you like, it’s just because