Etymology Bryan Walpert (Cinnamon Press) RRP $25 ISBN 978-1-905614-73-8

Keith Nunes

Erudite (learned; showing great learning, says the Oxford) comes to mind when reading Bryan Walpert’s debut collection of poems Etymology. Erudite with gusto, though – no dry explanations of the great meanings of words and things in our universe but rather, a genuinely poetic look at life through a microscope.

            What Walpert does for the reader is expand the mind while consoling it. We are taken on a trip into the inner reaches of words and when there, we are entertained with lines such as:

 

“Shade is a cold cloth on the head”

“Everyone needs … a room in which to pass the time, a square of carpet on which to sleep then wake in a patch of sun”

“…to the shallows between your lips”

“…as dawn slips the mooring of dark”

“When I touched you it wasn’t ownership”

“ … as my mop drank the day from the tiles.”

 

            Then there’s a wonderful image created in ‘Waterside Pavilion Without Rowboat’: “There is a rowboat floating by that gazebo. Or it was there, yesterday. Look harder. Paint as if you remember. Paint as if you have drifted up to yesterday, surprising it.”

            In ‘Ode to My Father’s 14th Month in Retirement’ he finds new ways to couch phrases that have long been trodden on: “Cherry trees warm the blossoms that held their breaths through winter.”; “…the azaleas, planted twenty years gone by with a younger man’s back.”

            Away from the delving there are poems with simple lyrical beauty as in ‘Twin Lakes’, which has two moons and a boy growing for all to see: “When I turn my head the full moon is cut clean by the peak, then rises faster than I knew possible through  the clouds. Its twin in the lake floats at the far edge, at the centre. A fish jumps.” Then he completes the circle and offers an inspiring view of what he sees: “The brightest moon of my life is wading, like a child, to shore.”        

            I particularly enjoyed ‘Operation, October’, when the writer sees himself as a spitting image of his father but untouched in comparison to his father’s skin which is under the knife of a surgeon; and ‘The Scientist, My Wife, Explains Satellite Imagery’ which manages to interweave some fascinating facts with a love story that raises the question of sex in an inventive way.

                    Although this his first book of poems, Walpert is well established as a poet and academic. He won the 2007 New Zealand Poetry Society International Poetry Competition, is poetry editor of Bravado magazine which comes out of the Bay of Plenty and is a winner of a National Tertiary Teaching Excellence Award for teaching creative writing in New Zealand. He is a senior lecturer in the School of English and Media Studies at Massey University in Palmerston North.

            This background all makes perfect sense when you read his works that stand as an intellectual and imaginative exploration of human relationships and poetry itself. Never overly emotional, Bryan is actually restrained and amusing and can turn a pretty mean metaphor which makes for a colourful and enlightening read.  

 

 

 

 

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