Steal Away Boy: Selected Poems of David Mitchell ed. Martin Edmond and Nigel Roberts (AUP, ) ISBN 978-1-86040-459-8  RRP $34.99

Gill Ward

Reviewing Steal Away Boy is, for me, both a pleasure and a responsibility.  Knowing David Mitchell from the early years when he was around Wellington with writers and ‘wild boys' such as Nigel Roberts (who co-edited this volume with Martin Edmond) means I need to be mindful of bias. However, after a lifetime of poetry immersion, I have reasonable credentials on which to base my assessment of this long awaited poetry collection. Mitchell's only book  since his award winning first publication, Pipe Dreams in Ponsonby in 1971.

To call it simply a poetry collection is a misnomer. In this book Roberts and Edmond have given us an introduction to Mitchell's life and times.  It makes for absorbing reading and a valuable background to David Mitchell, the person as well as David Mitchell the poet. The editors have given us a picture of Mitchell, employing Michael King's notion of ‘the compassionate truth'. Those who knew David knew him often as erratic and unpredictable but he maintained a following of affection over many years.  I would advise reading the biography, so meticulously culled from many pages of notes, information and recollections provided by Mitchell's friends and colleagues in the poetry world, before embarking on the poems.  It gives a backdrop to the poetry, the stories, the lovers and the travels of this troubadour poet.

It was a race against time to put the volume into Mitchell's hands so he could see and hold it. He now lives in a nursing home, unable to speak, slowly being overcome by the degenerative disease of supranuclear palsy.

In the days when we were all discovering e e cummings and Kerouac, Mitchell was the beat poet of Wellington.  His poetry has his own distinct beat.  It is performance poetry. It looks like performance poetry on the page.  The shape and style of the poems are important.  The layout and spacing present as a script for the stage.  This was what Mitchell did so well and he encouraged others to share their poems this way. He founded Poetry Live, at The Globe in Auckland in 1980. A weekly event, it hosted established poets and gave emerging poets a chance to read in front of an audience.  But, go on - read the book, go to Mitchell's page on NZ electronic poetry - www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz.  Listen to Mitchell in his own voice.

New Zealanders are getting braver about exposing themselves in their writing but this was never a problem for Mitchell. His love poems are graphic and moving. He put them in all their intimacy on the page and was never shy about leaping to a table or a chair to recite and rave to an sometimes astonished and unexpecting audience.

Thanks to the generosity and unstinting graft of Roberts and Edmond we now have this book by (dare I use the word) an iconic New Zealand poet.  It reads like an autobiography of Mitchell's life and times in poetry. He is not afraid to take us into his pain, his intimacies, his loves, his passions and share his political commentary.

Excerpts and titles in this review keep to the punctuation and form as written by Mitchell.

I have a difficulty with quoting lines of poetry out of context but who could not be stirred by the closing lines in ‘night through the orange window':

she
who caught my lips gently
between her small cold teeth
who kissed the husks from my slow eyes
so that I too might weep
for life
I remember her as a fifth season
who came unheralded
and walked in beauty.

Mitchells poem ‘la condition humaine (man's estate)' is a rhythmic tribute to Mt Eden . It takes you there, sets you among the rambling plants and waltzing butterflies of late summer. It is another side to his poetry - a joyous song of suburban life which follows a long and affectionate poem of his "wee neighbour in Mt Eden" giving him a gift of guava jelly.  There is Mitchell doing domesticity with every bit as much assurance as writing of Paris, Barcelona or at sea along the African West Coast.  Yet as well as joy there is such a well of sadness in so much of the poetry:

when all this sensual night has died
& dried away the mottled skin
remember how it was / those summer days
when
we drew orange blinds across the world's
enormous room /...

The only way to appreciate this book of poetry is to buy it, own it and read it from cover to cover.

To take some last lines out of context from a particularly moving poem, ‘kingseat / my song 1969',

you know my song / & you
know my name . . .

 

my name is david mitchell

 

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