Reading Harry Rickett’s Selected Poems is to reacquaint myself with old friends; to delight in poems I have loved and to see them in new lights. In his terrific endnote Harry comments on two turning points in his genesis as poet: having children and a weekend poetry workshop in his late twenties. From the writing weekend he absorbed the idea that “every word had to earn its keep” and in fatherhood he matured poems as he walked and held his unsleeping babies. He also learnt the old poets by heart at school.

Ricketts has written 11 poetry collections along with nonfiction books (including his sublime account of the war poets) and anthologies he has edited. His poetry catches what he lives, breathes, thinks, feels, grieves, loves. He writes as reader, father, partner, friend, teacher, poet. His poetry favours both light and dark, an economy of line, shifting forms (limericks, couplets, prose poems, trilolets, tritinas). You get a vital sense of the context of the poetry’s making: from the music he has listened to, books he has read, artwork that has gripped him, cricket matches.

I am drawn to the personal threads, to several poems dedicated to his daughter Jessie (“Soon, very soon, / you’ll say goodbye, and I’ll start waiting”), to his other children, to tender poems addressed to friends no longer with him. So many poems carry both an everyday pulse and a luminosity as you read. I particularly love Rotoma Days (1994), reminiscent of Janet and John readers, so matter of fact, so rich in holiday temperament:

A bellbird whistles up the light.

Cecil drifts off for an early dip

while Dick makes tea for anyone

awake enough to drink it.

Garry appears, starving,

makes tomatoes on toast.

I am also drawn to the personal threads that touch upon shadows: departed friends, a relationship breakup that threatens losing the children in How Things Are. On a number of occasions Ricketts converses with poets in order to comment upon his own ideas and situations. In the very moving Under the Radar he responds to Wordsworth’s lines on suffering before speaking of his own. Here are the final lines:

(…) Always under your radar

and you under mine, we know

the darker frequencies by heart.

Sometimes we seem two ghosts

obscurely haunting each other’s lives.

Equally searing, but employing a different form, and inspired by Nick Ascroft, is Grief Limericks, with its pain-stabbing gaps and repetitions:

I once had a stepson called Max

with a head full of cricketing facts,

who one winter’s day

I once had a stepson called Max.

So many deeply satisfying threads to track. A significant thread is the ability of poetry to sing existence into being, to draw in other voices and wisdoms, to contemplate failure, success, marriage, or face the past (or not). Poetry becomes a way of being, of nourishing both self and loved ones. Equally resonant is the attention paid to books, to books read but also to books acquired, especially second-hand books whose annotations and inscriptions are as poignant as the reading impact.

Selected Poems showcases the work of one of our beloved poets. His poetry embraces humour, the necessity of books and reading, the ability of poetry to dance from melancholy to exquisite sheen, from plain speech to elegant soundings, to the whip and caress of life. This is an anthology to treasure.

The song croons ‘Here Comes the Night’

very quietly. Meanwhile the baby

spoons its porridge into a moon.

The black dog leads the song

down long, unlovely streets.

The night is slowly eating the moon.

From Song

Reviewed by Paula Green