Reviews: A Long Road Trip Home and Night Shifts

Why don't I read more poetry? Partly it's narrow-mindedness. I don't write poetry, so it's not my first choice to read.  Laziness also features, I don't focus enough; I read extensively rather than intensively. I find the linear movement of fiction and most non-fiction easier.

US pundit Edward Wilson reckons it's poetry's own fault, symptomatic of a ''decline in public esteem and support for the humanities,” largely due to ''their overly narrow focus on the human condition.” Yes, well – I've always thought that focusing on the human condition (and that should surely read human conditions) is one of poetry's strengths.

I commend any authors who commit themselves to the form. They're not cellar-dwellers, but they're often garret-sitters. A contemporary of Wordsworth sneered that ''The primrose on the river brim / Was one-and-six a line to him.” If only: payments now are minimal or non-existent. A growing number of outlets ask contributing poets to pay them before they'll even consider submissions.

Anyway, I miss out by not reading more poets. These two new selections from Roger Hickin's Cold Hub Press – and all hail to that faithful servant / practitioner – prove the point.

I like the restraint of both Pat White and John Allison. They've both been around for a while (sorry, gentlemen). They're both aware that implication can be more effective than explication or exclamation. ‘Silence is the answer,’ writes White, with an echo of Hamlet. I'm with you, sir.

So let's take White first. He's a versatile chap: the darkly glowing cover of Night Shifts features one of his own paintings. The 30-odd poems within are often ruminations on the essentially fragile, ephemeral nature of things. ‘Home....is always elsewhere.’ It's a sombreness relieved and lifted by a belief in redemptive small blessings: ‘Another chance to keep going / as if every breath matters.’ Late afternoon light can still compensate for microplastics and fertiliser leaching. Hope endures that ‘traces of song still trill.’

Places are specifically, meticulously evoked. The West Coast becomes an emblem: ‘Alps to the east wild ocean to the west;’ ‘breakers bash surge and backwash.’  The lark ascends in a Central Otago summer. Titles include Lookout at the port....Heavy dew on the grass at Okarito....Shingle roads raise dust... Highway One. We're taken offshore to Alaska and to a miniature Chinese landscape.

Journeys literal and metaphorical feature: ''wayfarers trying to find / where totara and kowhai put roots down''. There's light and night, big skies and horizons, wide meanings in small spaces. Pleasingly provocative images: starlings chattering like financial pundits; women compared to mycelium (read it and be delighted); Winter's last days opening into the first flourishes of Spring. Well-set, sinewy lines, with a wry disclaimer that ''….every word on the page / falls short''. The poems have a tightness, an unstrained focus which show the mileage that White has put in.

John Allison's work here is more overtly cerebral and inward-turned, though he can also render his grandfather's machete, a wooden tiller, ‘the breadboard that kept on giving / its fragrance with every stroke of the knife’ immediately and authentically. There are motifs of vulnerability and transitoriness similar to White's: ‘Practise loss, the only way to go.’ Again like White, Allison does it sparingly, with a stoicism that almost endearing: ‘it's just the way it is sometimes.’ A funeral brings awareness that a friend is ‘no longer the man he was / he is now more or less forever.’ And do read his quite terrific Singing the Blues.

Landscapes loom here, too: Southland, Lebanon, Louisiana, Yangshuo. So do objects and sensations which startle with their potency – a blue bottletop among flotsam on a beach, ‘so much brighter than it needs to be;’ the reek of butyric acid from a ginkgo tree. Allison is a visually rewarding poet who understands that the gaps between lines, the empty spaces on a page can impact as much as the black bits.

He's a reader as well. Another Direction, one of his sequences that assembles lives and lands inside five - six pages, resonates with acknowledged echoes of “Curnow et al.” Rilke and Joseph Beuys get referenced; Paradise Lost gets quoted. It's done without ostentation; it brings some effective parallels and variations. The guy looks at other authors the way I should.

Well-made books of poetry can give such tactile satisfaction Quite apart from their contents, they can please the eye, the hand, even the nose. Italian physicist-philosopher Carlo Rovelli chooses his professional and recreational reading matter partly by how pleasing a volume smells when he opens it. He'd commend these two collections. So do I, for multiple reasons.

 Reviewed by David Hill