Dream Boat: Selected Poems Tony Beyer (HeadworX 2007); 224 pp; rrp $34.99 ISBN 978-0-473-12652-0
Keith Nunes
Sixty this year, awash with published poems, Tony Beyer is another Kiwi who can say he's knocked the bastard off. Since his first published work Jesus Hobo in the 1970s, Beyer has been consistently truthful and staunch - he means what he says and says what he means.
Dream Boat: Selected Poems catalogues 30 years of his best work and puts into print his legacy as a very fine New Zealand poet. His work has been scattered across many anthologies and more than 10 collections of poetry - this new book brings it all together in one place so we as readers can see where he
has been and where he has come to.
Beyer, who was born in Auckland but now lives in New Plymouth, also recently edited Poetry Aotearoa (Picaro Press, Sydney) which is a bi-annual selection of contemporary New Zealand poetry for Australian readers.
Almost bugged with the success and the power of Jesus Hobo Beyer has strived to outdo the standard bearer and Dream Boat shows he has grown in stature and maturity over the years. There are many highlights in the 200-plus pages of poems but those that stand out for me include ‘Guru Songs' :
here by the muttering fire
where rain from windward
beads my coat"
the twist in the tale of the ‘Dancing Bear'; ‘Cornwallis'; and ‘The Seventies': "sitting in the shade of a wide phoenix/palm in the asylum grounds".
‘Roll of Honour' reads like a Beyer poem often does - to the point:
in the cold museum
among the marble
and the golden names
I grip my fists
with desperate
grief for youth
now most of mine
has passed
and my son is growing.
In ‘White Games' he conjures wonderful New Zealand images and sounds: "the shadows of the oaks caressed the cricket pitch"; "a flatulence of bugles/coaxing five hundred/raw hymnal voices/into exaltation".
‘Coming Home' moved me greatly with its admiring portrait of dad and then the crushing almost unbelievable bursting of the bubble as an irate mother berates the father for coming home drunk and late - "I suppose he had/never been that size before".
In ‘Pacificity' he steps out of himself for a moment and fires off a barrage of vivid images like some sort of machine gun splintering a wooden house: "blunt artillery of thunder among the hills"; "amazing ginger lioness eyes"; "pallor of revellers in pub coloured photographs"; "dancing garments on the dry line"; and finally in closing somewhat breathless - "foreplay of tides against my porous heart"
‘Red Sofa' for me sums up Beyer in that it expresses the nuances and the colour of life in the towns and cities of this country. He does it simply, without fanfare, and he does it with meaning and humour -
I once saw
all the sofas in Puhinui
change hands
in an afternoon";
then he slips into another dimension and in ‘Murnau' casts a black vampire-like cloud over a moment between two people - "the shadow of his
hand/slides like liquid from her lap/ and grips her heart"
‘The Year 2000', ‘Mending' and ‘The Rescue' raise their hands as exceptional works, showing Beyer as a compassionate and caring man and a poet with well-honed skills. Perhaps one of the finest of his works is the relatively epic-sized ‘El Mreir', which switches from Egypt and the Second World War to
home and present day and paints a picture of a returned serviceman and his family coming to grips with what changed their lives forever - "Not enough has been said yet about that time".
Dream Boat is an outstanding collection of poetry and the publisher HeadworX was inspired to put together this book. It has opened my eyes to a career that deserves another mention.
