Just This Brian Turner (Wellington: VUP, 2009), 112 pp, rrp $25.
Joanna Preston
They say you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but in the case of Just This, Brian Turner's ninth poetry collection, it's not a bad place to start. The cover is a photograph of the Matukituki River Valley - rugged, craggy mountains rise up from the river like the disinterest of god, and the humanised area limited to a winding road in the shadows and a smatter of green slashed with the golden brown of gorse. Not precisely forbidding, but not interested in making any concessions to human ease or pleasure. But look again, and the colours soften the sternness - indigo for the shadowed riverbed, shifting through blue to green and gold and up into mauve as the mountains lift away. It's very beautiful, once your eye adjusts.
And that's a good description of these poems. Most of them are quite conversational, but it's the sort of conversation of a man walking through the hills with a dog, talking to himself as much as to the animal. So the conversation wanders, meanders, leaps and returns. There's a real restlessness about the poems, and more than a little regret. Lots of poems of loss and absence, both present and anticipated. The humour is generally wry, verging on black, and there's more than a little anger in the background.
There are quite a few times when the poems feel too personal, as though we're eavesdropping, or being asked to read the pages of Turner's journal. Some of the poems become too caught up in their own abstraction and the reader loses interest (always a problem for a collection with so many occasional poems). But then the next poem (or next image) snags you back in, and you find yourself caught up in the conversation again - the structuring of the collection is very intelligent.
One thing that did surprise me was how imagistic some of the poems were, despite their seeming talky-ness. Many start with a semi-abstract proposition, and then shift into a concrete depiction. A pair of favourite examples (in full):
Joy
He knew what joy is,
the urge
to break into a run
to greet a son
returning home.
and
Umbrella
When you hear of older sods
reflecting on, and accounting for,
their idiot youth, musing
it was because they saw themselves
as bulletproof, you're bemused.
To you, youth was fear, fragility,
the future a fog rolling in at twilight
time. Nothing seemed benign
or rosy for long: dark clouds
massed. An umbrella furled at the door.
Beautiful examples of showing just enough, and of how to turn didactic into evocative. But it isn't always handled this well, and the collection's voice does sometimes lapse into a moralistic drone. Lines such as "Is it too late for her to be de-bugged?" (‘A PM in the High Country') insert petulant (or simply ugly) notes into otherwise moving poems. He's aware of it too - in part 16 of the long sequence ‘Considerations':
Be serious
and someone
will say
you're silly,
or that they don't
want moral missives
from someone
presuming
to be wise.
But those are risks inherent to this voice, this stance. And, for the most part, the collection works. There is such mastery of craft behind even the simplest of the poems, and the best lines are as sharp as an iron frost. These are bitter times, and Brian Turner gives a damn. You can forgive a little sermonising from a man talking to his dog. To quote from the lovely ‘Morning After a Storm';
I could ask
for more, but not today.
Joanna Preston is an Australian-born Christchurch writer and teacher, whose first poetry collection, The Summer King, has been recently been shortlisted for the Mary Gilmore Prize.
