Slim Volume

What do poet James Brown and I have in common? Palmerston North – for both of us a stamping ground, a provincial upbringing, and a writer’s target. Not content with sounding off about it in his earlier collection Tip Shop, Brown includes three poetic evocations of the place we love to hate.

Not that One Thing Leads to Another or my Part in the Dairy Industry is critical. Instead, it is a celebration of a bygone job: the milk run. “The cul-de-sac’s streetlamp / glows like a glass of milk” sets the scene and there’s “A standing man / on the brink of his / water feature / A hesitation in a / dressing gown.”

I am compelled, however, to mention Another Palmerston North Poem in which our writer’s take on the town is reflected in an over-simplistic rhyme scheme, words that jar, and unkind observations.

I almost forgive Brown though because of his services to theatre as related in Set Building. Former university students will smile nostalgically at recollections of such an activity and its rewards. “It doesn’t convert me to Shakespeare, / though I do get together with Cordelia.” And some of us may also grin wryly at Unfamiliar Text in which a misprint in a student exam paper leads hapless readers on an unwelcome search for meaning. Students, by the way, “know nothing and, worse, / they don’t know that they know nothing.” This poem is hilariously clever: it’s a linguistic and intellectual delight.

This may be a slim volume, but it contains a disproportionately fat poem titled simply Amen, five and a half pages worth of expansion on the subject of the male sex. No woman writer could get away with this – so thanks Mr Poet. “Men on top of their game, the world, spaghetti…all covered with cheese”. No egg on your face for these observations, James!

The final few poems are characterised by free-form presentation, and philosophical observation dressed in metaphor. You Don’t Know What You’re Missing is a fine example. I’m borrowing that title as my advice to would-be readers: take on the welcome weight of Slim Volume.