KEY POINTS:
The first poem in Glenn Colquhoun's new book of poetry, How We Fell, relates the day he met the young woman who would become his wife.
Her eyes were two guns
in the hands of a killer.
They drilled me before I had a chance to drill them.
I did not pick a fight
but lay there in the street before I knew it.
Colquhoun was 19, swept off his feet. The book ends with exactly the same poem, but the meaning has changed.
After 10 years, the marriage had fallen apart. The line drawings of two little figures which illustrate the book are on the final page, collapsed in the dust, their feet facing each other like a pair of wasted battlers.
In between, 43 poems in How We Fell narrate the arc of a relationship which he acknowledges - in a poem in the book - has left scars even though it ended 13 years ago.
Some years ago, Colquhoun entered another relationship and has a daughter, now aged 3.
Today, he lives alone at Waikawa Beach, north of Otaki. Libby, the mother of his daughter Olive, lives 4km away, at the other end of the beach. They split Olive's care between them.
Colquhoun, 42, is a GP at Hora Te Pai medical clinic in Paraparaumu, the winner of this year's Whanau Ora Awards with the Ministry of Health for "successful integration of GP services within a Maori health service".
But Colquhoun is also one of our most popular poets, admired for his honest voice, dry sense of humour, and a quiet instinct for tapping deep emotions.
His first book The Art of Walking Upright won the 2000 Montana NZ best first book award, followed by An Explanation of Poetry To My Father and Playing God, which is in the rare position of being the only poetry collection to achieve sales of 5000-plus in the Booksellers NZ platinum category - the equivalent of the likes of Once Were Warriors and The Whale Rider in the adult fiction section. In 2003 he won the Montana readers' choice award.
Popular he may be, but he claims, "I am clearly hopeless at love," and laughs ruefully. "I have told Libby I'm exhausted. I can't write another book of poems about failed relationships."
Colquhoun started writing about his marriage six years ago, when he was living in Te Tii on the Purerua Peninsula, on the east coast of Northland.
Although the marriage ended all those years ago, he says his connection with his wife Barbara was like no other he has experienced. "It was that relationship you have when you believe in everything and when it doesn't work, it breaks you from ever believing quite the same again.
"I am sort of aware of what Michael King talked about - writing about someone who's still alive and what you say and what you don't say.
"Suffice to say she was someone who came from a very different world from what I came from, who purely and simply I fell in love with and was strongly attracted to.
"I was attracted to the world of Barbara - things hadn't been easy for her in her life and she brought many new insights into my life about the way things can be for people."
When they met, Colquhoun was studying theology, preparing to be a minister in the Seventh Day Adventist Church, near Newcastle in New South Wales. Barbara, an Australian, shared the faith, and was studying at the same college to be a teacher.
Referring to those killer eyes described in the first poem, Let me describe for you her eyes, Colquhoun says, "That's my first memory of her, those eyes. Bang bang. I watched way too many westerns as a child. It's really just a metaphor for when love slays you."
While Barbara was a couple of years older than Colquhoun, he confides, "I was naive then and I'm still naive but naive back then in the most lovely way that all 19-year-olds are naive and thank God for it. You are horrifically open, and that is both glorious and frightening.
"The church made me naive plus I was born naive. A double dose of naivety which I find I still unearth at times in attitudes towards things.
"I have to be careful - knowing there's a little bit of rot in that wall, you don't want to put too much weight on it. It can be a weakness but also a strength."
The couple married four years after meeting. Colquhoun dropped out of theology college halfway through the four-year course and they moved to Auckland. Six or seven years into the relationship, he left the church and underlying differences started to appear.
"The church was never that important to Barbara but God was. There was a sense of immediacy of God in her life which I never had. I am probably a natural doubter who was trying to be a believer. You meet some people who have a deep sense of God, she always had that other-worldly sense."
Colquhoun puts the death of the marriage down to "entropy and not doing good maintenance ... the things you don't keep saying to each other, the small retreats you make".
"There was a dynamic at times that the difference of her world clashed with the difference of mine. I lived in her world for a time and tried to understand it and support her but in the end it became exhausting.
"I wanted to make things better for Barbara - that's why there's this sense of heroism running through the book.
"In the end, I became exhausted by that process. But I don't want to represent her in a pejorative sense at all.
"I've had other relationships that have suffered from entropy and that's okay, that's an everyday story, but this was remarkable to me because we attempted to do so much in the relationship.
"We attempted to fight lots of demons and dragons and in the end it wore us down. It saw me eaten out without even knowing that and as soon as the first puff came along, I cracked and fell over and surprised myself."
The end - "a horrible end", he calls it - came when Colquhoun fell in love with someone else. "Nothing was consummated in that relationship but it dawned on me I was a million miles away from Barbara to have been able to do that.
"It made me review everything between us. I looked into myself for the feeling I had had, and I realised I was numb from the difficulties we had been through. I didn't have the energy to pursue us again. We didn't have children and it would be easier for us to go our separate ways."
Barbara returned to Australia, and Colquhoun got what he calls "a lot of therapy" and ran away "to those wonderful people at Te Tii who put me back together" - including his beloved Aunty Rongo, who was in her 80s and has since passed away.
There he met Libby, fathered Olive, split up and left Te Tii at the end of 2004.
"Libby is from Otaki so I moved down here and we share Olive half the week each.
"If I had stayed up there, I wouldn't see Olive or else I'd have to have some sort of custody fight. It's been difficult but we have remained friends and tried really hard not to pursue that.
"It's like Olive's parents are together but separated by 4km of beach and there are things they don't talk about."
Colquhoun says he has noticed that people have been unsure how to respond at the public readings from How We Fell, when he recites lines from poems like Let me describe for you the death of love.
Our love died like a bad actor on stage, with a loud aaarrrggghhh!!!/ Shot twice in the chest, he staggered to a window, breaking it in slow motion, before falling head first from a tall building on to the roof of a passing car - just the beginning of an accelerating litany of appalling disasters.
"Most of the readings, I concentrate on the ones that are humorous that people can engage with easily, but these poems are not funny and if they are funny, it's with a bite.
"Sometimes I read it backwards so we get the falling out of love over and done with early and we can finish with falling in love and they don't feel so bad.
"I'm used to an audience laughing and feeling upbeat but this is a book of bittersweet poems."
And, yes, writing the poems has been cathartic. "A lot of the catharsis had come before I started otherwise I wouldn't have been ready to start.
"I am conscious that people seeing it for the first time might think 'he's in the rawness right now' but I don't feel that rawness any more. But again, every time you tell a story it opens things up again and provides new insights."
Let me describe for you the death of love: the final verse
His heart continued to beat on screen while a young nurse watched,
waiting for the next exciting episode.
The one where the earthquake arrives followed by the flood, volcanic eruption, devastating killer virus and crazed psychotic clown until eventually the show was scrapped and the scriptwriters died their appropriate deaths and Charlton Heston found the Statue of Liberty half-buried on a deserted beach.
At which time the nurse woke from sleeping next to her patient's chest, convinced she felt at last a definite albeit weak tug pulling against the palm of her hand.
Of this poem, Colquhoun says, "It's like a bad character in a movie, that's Glenn Close's hand coming out of the bath again and that is quite reassuring after a while. You realise there is no such thing as the death of love, it's just the transmutation of love ... this woman still tugs my hand 13 years later."
* How We Fell is published by Steele Roberts ($29.99); the illustrations are by Nikki Slade Robinson
