Self-titled, Tony Chad, HeadworX, 2006. 64pp, $24.95. ISBN 9780473109455
Bernard Gadd
This is Tony Chad’s third poetry collection and billed as the best of his work for the past eight years. It’s a very readable collection. Chad has an eye for the everyday and an ear for ordinary speech. He’s a singer and song writer, using in a variety of ways language, form and topics of contemporary pop or country songs, advertising, and conversation, including their repetitions. He can take a cliché like “toeing the line” and by the end of the poem
… the line
circles
me
binds me
tighter
&
tighter (the line)
Some of the poems are particularly effective because of their low-key language and approach, like ‘Absence’ in which:
Every day
I talk to people
about you
this is your world
although you’ve
never been here
Chad is a well known haiku poet and he includes a couple of pages of strong haiku that are sometimes wry: "in the phone box / my girlfriend calls / her
lover.
One poem that particularly struck me was ‘The Journey':
I plan to do things
the Heritage trail
the bush walks
the tourist bit …
I watch the ocean.
I felt that the last section went on rather too long. But this is another well produced HeadworX book worth looking into.
