The Trouble Lamp Richard Langston (Fitzbeck Publishing, 2009) ISBN 978-0-473-16196-1 RRP

Laurice Gilbert

I confess - I asked Richard for a signed copy of this book so I could review it myself and keep it; I am a shameless fan. He's published three previous collections at roughly 2-year intervals: Boy, Henry, come see the blue and The Newspaper Poems, and is one of Wellington's best-kept secrets. I learned of him through the Wellington Winter Readings of 2008 (‘The White Album'), organised by HeadworX Publishers, Earl of Seacliff Art Workshop and Kwanzaa - the Afrikan Shop.

He's a journalist, not an academic poet, so there's no artful fireworks or mysteriously labyrinthine wordplay. In fact, his poems are often so spare as to be almost haiku-like, and the opening poems in the first section of this collection (‘I'- that's a Roman numeral, not an ego) are frankly romantic and autobiographical:

Looking into the lens
falling again
toward each other.

Your hand threaded
into the fabric of me.
from: ‘Photographs'

Langston sticks to what's important to him - ‘write about what you know' - using deceptively simple language that sizzles with the desired element of surprise that makes it poetry:

Sisters did not have smelly feet and pong out the gym.
They had girlfriends to lighten the eyes of brothers
heavy with homework.
Sisters were calm as mid-summer lakes,
mutinous as rough seas.
from: ‘In the House of Sisters'

Langston tells little stories that move: "only now/ I understand// how a motorbike/ stopped her son's life" (‘Mrs van Zandt') and amuse: "My stomach sloshed;/ I puked." (‘First Test 1970', but it's not what you think). He simplifies details:

Some winged Athene on a racing cycle
glides to a halt at the traffic lights:
shades, helmet, hair tucked-in for speed.
Those limber athletic legs
ending in a professional click into the pedals.
from: ‘Not Myth'

and handles the grand metaphor in a to-die-for manner: "This blue.// A thousand cubic metres/ dumped into Civic Square." (‘Spring So Fast Returning")

The final poem of this section, the eponymous ‘The Trouble Lamp', is a tribute to Langston Senior, exploring the differences between them without judging the father.

In Section II the mood shifts dramatically, to poems dealing with the anticipation and aftermath of his father's (and later a loved uncle's) death: "This January day winter news:/ our father's left lung clouding up.// Dire weather to come." (‘Southerly') They are arranged chronologically, so that the reader is drawn through the last dark days and the immense sense of loss.

Lament

When time-worn beasts lie down in the dust,
When crops are left to stand in the field,
When a lone boat sets sail on endless seas,
When dark tides wash through the gathered,

Fathers die.

The penultimate poem is the one that grabbed my gut when I first heard Langston read in 2008: "It lacked people. / Its corridors were loveless./ The deathly quiet of once." (‘The Abandoned Hospital'). I find that third line almost personal, and keep going back to it, poking myself in the eye to see if it still hurts.

There are themes running through Langston's poems: blue, the sea, lakes and boats, but they don't come across as overdone, just noticeable. If I have any criticism at all (maybe I have to try harder) it's that ‘It Starts Here' could comfortably lose the last two lines, and the illustrations (by Emily Efford), while giving the poems lots of room to breathe, seem unsure whether to be abstract or not, which is distracting, but hardly Langford's responsibility

Overall this is a collection I'm pleased to own, and many of the poems feel like old friends already.

 

Laurice Gilbert is a Wellington poet who runs the NZ Poetry Society as National Coordinator, and was elected President when no-one else wanted the job.

 


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