Pocket Edition Geoff Cochrane (Victoria University Press, 2009) RRP $25 ISBN 978-0-86473-604-8

Keith Nunes

I'd like to meet Wellington poet Geoff Cochrane's muse. I imagine her/him as being wild and free - inspiring and quirky with periods of darkness. These are the qualities that Cochrane's work presents to me - coming at life from the side entrance; dismissing the front door as a waste of creative time.

The Pocket Edition collection is - as with most of his work - fascinating and surprising. He doesn't lay out a tale but prefers to twist it till it bleeds and then he gives you the unfinished product.

I read him as dawn woke the neighbourhood and dabbled when the sun got pissed off and went home and still I found the same characteristic about his work - this guy's different!

Pieces like ‘The Last Time I Saw Him' make me take notice:

Sunbeams titled in
like death rays
His wet soul winked and steamed
Like jellied blood

‘Looking to Antiquity' is equally brief and moving:

The limy light of a feeble Calvary
 
I find I like the pudent Greek idea:
you reach the age of sixty,
you throw the little party,
you drink the hemlock

He rarely waffles, this man who will turn 60 next year. Even when the poem stretches out to its prose brother and we get ‘Milk' - a crisp and astute study of alcoholics trying to get sober at the local Rehab Centre. The piece pulls you in, entertains, and with a flourish pushes you out the other end.

He swings back to the short and sharp with ‘Leo Leo':

A magpie and a hedgehog
witnessed the destruction
of the last lion in England.
 
An arrow in its neck,
the muscular cat crept into the undergrowth
to bleed and die.
 
It must have happened, once.
The warm, crestfallen beast
becoming as time passed
no more than the bland device
heraldry perpetuates.

Then as an aside he throws in a one-liner in the poem ‘January':

Beaches and cream. If you liked school, you'll love World War I.

And how's this for insight in 'Analgesia':

The Haz Mat yard sleeps yellowly
and the airport talks to itself,
 
addresses itself
through a tinny megaphone.

The 64-page book isn't finished when the poems slink away and curl up for the night. No, there's an enthralling Addenda that includes illuminating quotes such as "Art is born of humiliation" (Auden); "Life is a drug that stops working" (Leonard Cohen) and crackers from Allen Ginsberg and Saul Bellow among others.

This inspiring and entertaining collection keeps Cochrane up there with the best of ‘em. One day when I grow up I want to be like Geoff Cochrane. I've already got the drinking down pat.

 

 

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