Short takes: Poetry

Reviewed by PENELOPE BIEDER

Alistair Paterson: Summer On The Cote D'azur

Alistair Paterson, former academic and naval commander, has gathered poems written between 1987 and 2003 to produce his first collection of poems since the 1980s, but his eighth volume overall.

In two parts, the first covers all the usual suspects - love, history, politics, publishing, sex, boats, other poets, and sailors. The second group of poems, including three sonnets on the 12th-century lovers Abelard and Heloise, are where he tries to fathom the fathomless, the mystery of life, where he closes in on sadness and loss and things left unsaid.

Always with wit and a subtle, knowing irony, he suggests that he has almost got it all figured out. There may be a few puzzles left for him to work on, but he is not going to let them disturb him too much. That's not to say he cannot also be direct, satisfyingly grumpy, focused.

When he visits the American poet Howard Nemerov at his rather grand, formal house in St Louis and tea is bought to the huge room they are sitting in, he is "trying to understand/what it was like to be famous -/& a well-paid poet in America".

Paterson is strong when he charts both weather and time, together with the memory of emotions. He describes the southerly wind arriving and "all that summer brought" vanishing.

His last poem is simply called Nor'wester, after the painting Canterbury Nor'wester, by Bill Sutton. In it he acknowledges that when he first saw the painting of tussock and tombstones and a red-roofed church it was before "we were able to see our own deaths". Now when he revisits it, he understands that Sutton had already reached that point.

It is a beautiful, strikingly simple poem, and provides a memorable end to a stylish collection.

All author royalties from this book go to Amnesty International.

HeadworX, $19.95


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Anna Livesey: Good Luck

Anna Livesey is only 24 and Good Luck is her first collection. She is winner of this year's Glenn Schaeffer Award to attend the Iowa Writers Workshop.

First up are a delightful, whimsical group of poems about food, love, childhood, home furnishings, museumsand similar. The meaty part of the book is reserved for two long poems, which have both won the Macmillan Brown Prize.

Napier charts the famous earthquake, while South Seas Analecta provides a series of glimpses of colonisation in the Pacific. Both use many words which are not hers, but those of witnesses to history or disaster, often both. In Napier, imagine the disquiet of the crew of the Northumberland when a wreck from 1887 came "boiling out of the harbour" and they read their "ship's name Northumberland/ on its barnacled side".

Victoria University Press, $24.95


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Mark Pirie: Gallery

Mark Pirie, 29, is a Wellington poet, co-founder of the young writers journal JAAM (Just Another Art Movement) and editor of two New Zealand anthologies of rising stars. He is a small press publisher for HeadworX, and Gallery is his sixth collection. It brings together the best of his first five books, and this selection underlines his affection for television and film.

To gain most from these smooth little poems with their droll wit and sometimes grubby realism, it would be useful to be almost as aware as Pirie is of the nuances and references of pop culture. This is what makes his poems such fun, though, and when you suddenly understand what he is saying, you feel undeniably cool.

Salt Publishing, $29.95

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David Howard and Fiona Pardington: How to Occupy Ourselves

David Howard, of Christchurch, has collaborated with established photographer Fiona Pardington to produce a series of lyrical poems that are at once restrained and intense.

They are such careful compositions, worked and reworked, I suspect, to produce lovely, surprising images from the most ordinary subjects - and this could be said of Pardington's photos too.

From "the surprise of sunshine in tractor-track puddles" to "eggs cackle in the pan" to "Your smile is as smooth as Charon's oar-hole", Howard's images pull you up and make you read the line again. He is a satisfyingly demanding read.

HeadworX, $29.95

* Penelope Bieder is a freelance writer.