Vincent O'Sullivan: Nice morning for it, Adam

Reviewed by PENNY BIEDER

Emeritus Professor at Victoria University Vincent O'Sullivan is acclaimed for his novels, plays, poems, anthologies and a recent biography of John Mulgan. This latest collection of poems continues along an alluring highway of words, with many detours off into small lanes and "Sunday pathways". The 52 poems are neatly divided into four parts, with 13 poems in each and, I suspect, careful attention to order and selection by the poet himself.

The overall impression is of a world of heightened sensuality, of gorgeous, hidden places, all observed with a dry intellectual rigour that is sad and wise and quite wonderful.

He addresses his newly sold home with the solemnity of a lover: "That room, this palace of ghosts. / Heels cross its uncarpeted boards, / as loud as it gets, walking / here and longing, standing here and leaving."

But then when he is addressing love itself he can step lightly back into humour: "Ah, the good old bonfire that lights the world!"

He gently introduces the loneliness of the human condition in a poem (with a deceptively mundane title: River road, due south) about an evening's dying light seen from a bus window: "Most of my life, it seems, I have been on a bus ..."

The "light that burns on the back porch / and a flag of expanding yellow", though, almost banishes the hint of forlorn despair hovering at his shoulder, but not quite, as he travels "past Rangiriri and Taupiri and into / the string of lights that thicken to suburbs".

It is not until the last line of the poem is reached that you understand this is an intense and important love poem, and then you have to read it over again, gaining so much more from it the second time.

His immensely sophisticated skill with the subtext of each poem (and often there are several layers of meaning) is hugely entertaining. This fine collection richly rewards repeated reading.

Publisher: Victoria University Press

Price: $24.95

* Penny Bieder is a freelance writer