Book Reviews: Two Walk in Edinburgh and Devonport: A Diary

A Mari Mahr image from Two Walk in Edinburgh. Photo / Supplied

As these two slim, hand-printed, limited-edition volumes confirm, the necessaries of the poetic writer are observation and contemplation, and the words are vehicles which realise them. And for the photographer, close observation and an eye that edits intuitively.

Poet and curator Gregory O'Brien has had a two-decade-long association with London-based photographer Mari Mahr, most recently when he was working on his series of essays about her late husband, the expat New Zealand artist Graham Percy.

Their Two Walk in Edinburgh has eight of her black-and-white photographs taken during a visit to the city. They are printed beautifully alongside short poems and prose by O'Brien, whose responses are to the images rather than Edinburgh.

O'Brien's measured words that accompany the photos allude to the passage of time and moments which begin thoughts leading to consideration of the infinite.

"The dying are the custodians of/ the living, each/in the other's place. We are with them/as they are/with us, walking," he writes alongside Mahr's photograph of three decorative butterflies - fragile and ephemeral creatures - fixed on a block wall.

Mahr's work equally captures the fleeting (a pocket watch frozen in its swing like a pendulum) or the closely observed (a brush on some stairs).

A slim, thoughtful collection which speaks quietly.

Writer/musician Bill Direen's Devonport Diary - written during his stay in an old house on Mt Victoria last year - is more problematic.

The short entries have him exploring the place he finds himself in after years in the South Island, Paris and Berlin (the local terrain is familiar to many Aucklanders so some observations are hardly resonant with insight). But there is dry humour and, once he is settled, his thoughts become more probing. A turning point comes when he quotes from a 2006 notebook, in which he wrote of having decided 12 years before to concentrate on short pieces which "amount to 'moments' of writing". Ambition took him to novels but, five years ago, he was back at that place, as he is on these pages of "moments".

Some entries come loaded with meaning, especially after that first Christchurch quake in September: "Climb on slabs as the stacks and slabs topple. Climb and climb. Hear nothing as the man-made crumbles to the south."

At other times, he grapples with the writing process ("I am beginning to see what Matisse meant when he said never to repeat a line. To go over a line is to destroy it.")

Thereafter follows a brief, artfully distilled fiction in which a son returns from self-imposed exile, back to Devonport, to sell the family villa he grew up in, "whose beauty was a wonder he dared not bruise with his touch". And you feel Direen has arrived also.

* Graham Reid is an Auckland writer and reviewer.

Book review

Two Walk in Edinburgh - Photographs by Mari Mahr, Poems by Gregory O'Brien
(Holloway Press limited edition, 90 copies $225)

Devonport: A Diary, by Bill Direen
(Signalman's House/Holloway Press, limited edition, 100 copies $100)