Moonshot Harvey Molloy (Steele Roberts, 2008) 64 pages. ISBN 978-1-877448-91-1 RRP $20

Suzanne Vaassen

Steele Roberts has given the poet an attractive and accessible first book. I experienced considerable joy in digging into Molloy's work, which is new to me. Born in Oldham, England, he emigrated here in the 1970s. The poems reveal he has taught in Singapore and the back cover tells us he lives in Wellington, teaching English and Drama at Porirua College. He studied English at Victoria and Massey Universities and completed a doctorate in Florida.

His poetry takes you to, even through, his concerns: astronomy, space, (the Gemini spacewalk), home life, school and Singapore. He makes frequent reference to history's famous, to a battle, a painter, a type of song, a biblical personality. They are poems with an intellectual bite which send you to the bookshelf or the internet, for more information.

On the back cover is Karori morning:

Last night coiled intestinal clouds
obscured Ophiuchus

now the fallen kowhai flowers are scarab beetles
frozen on the lawn's green plain        

burnt leaves taint the morning wind
& the hills are alive

with the sound of chainsaws

Ophiuchus. Then chainsaws. I quote this entire as it illustrates Molloy's breadth of vision. Ophiuchus is a large constellation located around the celestial equator. Its name is Greek for snake- holder. The phrase, "the lawn's green plain" reminds me of the simplicity and strength of a Seamus Heaney poem.

The front cover is fey, surreal, a reproduction of ‘Phenomenon of Weightlessness' by Remedios Varo (1908-1963) a female Spanish artist who moved to Paris during the Civil War. The painting was created 1958, and depicts a slim aesthete conjuring planetary forms. It seems a particularly apt choice.

Molloy's poetry alludes to a greater world than planet earth. While he speaks of his anchorage here his mind is free to roam.  Some poems read as prose, others as lists, some as couplets: some are short, others long. To quote ‘The astronomer's Christmas':

The magic wasn't enough.
He wanted to know what makes the stars burn.

The kids asked for knee rides,
smudged chocolate thumbs on the star maps.

The planets waltzed their retrograde waltz
above the dolls' house.

After dinner Taran brought his gifts
a grain of caster sugar cracked open

a Christmas cracker.  

... a grain of caster sugar! True or false, it's whimsy. Taran is his youngest son.

Singapore - apartment living, uniformed guards recording car registration numbers, a Sunday spent indoors... "the world outside's gone blur"...and, once he was due to leave:

the luxury of wondering
how you managed to live

in the circuit of these spaces
furnished room, void deck,

front lobby, mini-market,
community hall.

Living in Asia produced wonder, and something else: eyes open to another way of being, for Molloy as well as for me.

‘The footballer' was for George Best, the famed soccer player who died in November 2005. The soccer world wept, wrote about him and wept again. The English weekend papers were full of it. Three lines near the heart of the poem:

how he never had to think but left thinking
to a body that could be trusted on the pitch
ow his shins were always cut & bruised after a match

Then there is Lamech's complaint, a poem of three six-line stanzas about Sonny Jim and his destruction of home. It sounds terribly familiar and comic:

Saturday? The car? After what happened
last time with the elephants you can forget it.

What about the elephants? It boggles the mind. We all know Lamech - Noah's father - so after awhile we get the gist of these lines.

God knows this weather obsession & boat-building
caper is bloody weird if you ask me

I hope many more of our poetic community will access and enjoy Moonshot.

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