Bob Orr: Valparaiso

By PENELOPE BIEDER

In this fine new volume of poems, his sixth, you sense Bob Orr is laying to rest a few ghosts. They populate these elegant poems like the memories that they are - fleeting, insistent, sad and wonderful. There is his grandmother who he is told once had "beautiful and fine acorn-coloured hair" although he only remembers "an old woman with hair like tarnished silver". There is "the girl who had a front tooth missing" and the tyre shop man who "winds up the roller doors like it's the first act of a play".

The real subjects of these poems, though, are the places - houses, ships, beaches, oceans and farms - that live on in Orr's heart. Valparaiso is a place more imagined than real, despite there being a town of that name in South America and no doubt elsewhere, too. As the book's title, it symbolises the vast country of the poetic imagination, where anything can happen, and does.

Orr has been producing poetry since the 60s and these 57 new poems are divided into three sections: Mending Nets; Poppies and Paspalam; I Have Seen the Gods Gathering.

Orr grew up in the Waikato as an "inland child" but quickly sought the coast, and much of the book celebrates the oceans and its edges and people.

He now lives in Auckland and one supposes from his writing that the sea still plays an essential role in his life.

The imagery of cargo and those who haul it returns repeatedly - from Central Otago roadside stalls and their pinewood boxes of fruit to the "coloured boxes [that] swing from sky to wharf where fork hoists dance like bees".

Orr feels the weight of the human heart and its frail cargo, too - "from its hold take tenderly a cargo for which I have paid all duty".

The Waikato poems are elegiac in their recollection of a lost world. The sadness of old horses, the barefoot walk to school ("paspalam's sticky seedheads get caught between my toes"), his grandfather in the orchard where he "stood amidst butterflies - himself a walking wound from the First World War".

The more introspective inland poems provide a welcome counterpoint to those of the wild traveller, the seasoned sailor who has seen it all.

Orr manages to tread the fine line between sentiment and sentimentality and stay upright. He writes with a wry elegance, sometimes a little too lightly, but unabashed by his own vulnerability, and quietly celebratory about the important fact that he is still here, and still being visited by the "dark-eyed muse" of poetry.

Auckland University Press

$21.95