The Victims Of Lightning by Bill Manhire
Victoria University Press $30
Bill Manhire's previous collection, the award-winning Lifted, contains a number of poems that will endure in our national consciousness, as have the very best of Baxter and Curnow. His new book, The Victims of Lightning, draws upon a number of commissions and collaborations and is equally rewarding.
What makes a good poem ultimately magnificent is open to wide interpretation, but a great Manhire poem will offer you musicality and mystery. He scoots through the world open to anything so you never know what to expect, and this makes his collections extremely satisfying.
Manhire tries to imagine what it might be like to be a refugee, responds to a Peter Peryer image, the little match girl, the secret wife, chalk, the moon, the evening.
His list poem, 1950s, is etched forever like a favoured track on an LP that you want to play over and over. The poem accumulates nostalgic details that sweep you off your feet and into another time, with his trademark flair for rhythm and rhyme:
"My Just William. Counting to a million.
The Invercargill March. My false moustache."
I was reminded of Don McGlashan's ability as a songwriter to make poetry, because Manhire's ability as a poet can make a list sing.
There is an endearing and subtle thread of the child in this collection (the boy buried in the poet?), not just in the subject matter but also in the tender evocations and younger rhythms.
In Evening, it is as though the poem is making its way in the dark, securing little points of illumination for the ear of a child: "The giraffe/ puts down its knitting./ It, too, is sleepy."
Manhire can also transform an object into a thing of poetry, such as the ladder in his last collection. In The Lid Slides Back, a pencil case becomes extraordinary, not through marvellous feats but in the perfect economy of what it is.
The third part of the collection features poems written for the jazz musician Norman Meehan, with a particular voice in mind. These poems make a different kind of music and I kept, unexpectedly, trying to sing them, from the bluesiness of Bad Men to the glorious possibilities of Warehouse Curtains.
I am only just beginning with these poems, because Victims of Lightning is one of those precious collections that will not tire.
