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    Just This: Poems
    Just This: Poems
    Just This: Poems
    Ebook132 pages59 minutes

    Just This: Poems

    By Brian Turner

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    About this ebook

    The poet's ongoing love affair with his Central Otago home lies at the heart of this rich and compelling new collection that explores the politics of relationshipsand relationships themselves. Through a combination of people and place that gives the poems color and humor, the volume also examines friendship, politics, death, and the machinations of the modern business world. The mountains and lakes of the central South Island have a strongpresence in the imagery,while wry observations of people in that landscape movethe collection far beyond the confines of simple landscape poetry.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherVictoria University Press
    Release dateApr 1, 2010
    ISBN9780864736710
    Just This: Poems

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      Book preview

      Just This - Brian Turner

      JUST THIS

      BRIAN TURNER

       For my son, André

      Acknowledgements

      Grateful thanks to the New Zealand Listener, Otago Daily Times, Quadrant and Sport, in which some of these poems previously appeared; and to Gilbert van Reenen for the cover photographs.

      Contents

      I

      Epistemologies of Place

      Improving for the Worse

      What It’s Like

      Goodbye Uncle

      In a Sponsor’s Tent

      Wind

      Wind and Stars

      August, Ida Valley

      Snow in September

      When

      November Snow

      Foretold

      Full Moon in November

      December Drought

      East

      Just This

      Honestly

      Put Down

      Moving Stock

      On the Road to Wedderburn

      In the Hill’s Creek Cemetery

      Between Shingle Creek and Fruitlands

      Shapes of the Wind

      Theatre Country

      Humpty Dumpty

      Deserts, for instance

      Mercurial Michael in the Maniototo

      Red Tractor

      Blue Herons in the Evening

      Some Basic Facts

      Sky

      Last Outing

      Fisherman

      II

      In a South Dunedin Garden

      Journey

      First Day of School

      Joy

      Like Father, Like Son

      Father and Son

      Fear

      Open Road

      North Dunedin

      Farewell

      A Wry Big Bloke

      Precursors to Sleep

      Something That’s Yet to Come Your Way

      Sailing to the Is-Land

      Libraries

      III

      Chances of Revelation

      IV

      Unfashionable Suggestions

      Lifestylers Anonymous

      Documentaries about Tomorrow’s World

      Shareholders’ Meeting

      Gilt Edge

      Pawns in the Game

      Basic Instincts

      A PM in the High Country

      Up High

      High Society

      Hunkered Down

      Homecoming

      V

      Gryphon

      High Windows

      Umbrella

      Just About Complete

      Considerations

      Relationship Services

      Celebrity

      Levity

      Liberty

      Aren’t We All

      Hereafter

      Flutter

      Enduring Love

      Morning After a Storm

      Matukituki

      Backwards

      Such is Life

      Tool Kit

      The Earth is Enough

      We can be said only to fulfil our destiny in the place that gave us birth.

      William Hazlitt in ‘On Going on a Journey’, 1822

      A person’s life purpose is nothing more than to rediscover, through detours of art, or love, or passionate work, those one or two images in the presence of which his … heart first opened.

      Albert Camus

      I

      Epistemologies of Place

      There’s a side to beauty

      that is sadness enduring.

      There’s a belief in beauty

      that’s peculiarly universal

      while unique in itself

      to this punter, or that.

      It’s more the idea

      than the actuality

      of this place, not who

      had the idea for it

      that becomes a reality

      previously unimaginable.

      First there’s the perception,

      then the journey towards

      understanding that comes,

      you’re told, with empathy;

      and, finally, it’s the where

      you know that refines

      the who you are. It’s then,

      you could say, landscape’s

      indifference in itself

      mirrors our impermanence,

      has no awareness of the dramas

      which, paradoxically, heighten

      and enhance the sense of the

      numinous in nuance and hue.

      In other words, you choose

      what it is that makes for piety

      and pleasure, and obligation,

      and how you measure such,

      and what is meant by home,

      and why, or whether

      you believe, before

      your time’s up, that

      this big, unloved, untidy

      unwalled room is it. 

      Improving for the Worse

      I come from New Zealand.

      Most people don’t know where it is,

      or what it stands for. Good.

      Nor do most New Zealanders, 

      if they ever did. Sad. 

      All of us are islands, entirely lost,

      pretending we are not.

      What It’s Like

      When someone asks you to explain

      what it’s like where you come from

      you say you’re still finding out,

      and it’s not because you enjoy being

      vague, or smart-arse, a sophist

      if you like, it’s just because

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