The Original Brian Turner

Four books by Brian Turner:

Somebodies and Nobodies
Vintage, 2002, 399 pages

Just This
Victoria University Press, 2009, 111 pages, NZ$25

Inside Outside
Victoria University Press, 2011, 134 pages, NZ$30

Elemental: Central Otago Poems
Godwit, 2012, 212 pages, A$45

The original Brian Turner is a New Zealander, and a poet of such distinction that his work does not rely on any external circumstances to hold the attention of readers. In this, he is to be distinguished from the other Brian Turner whose poetry has come before the public eye in recent years, and whose work may not even have been published were it not for the fact that he served in Iraq with the US Army.

The first of the two Brian Turners has not lacked for recognition, at least in his home country. He was the New Zealand Poet Laureate from 2003 to 2005, he has received almost every possible award from the Commonwealth Poetry Prize to the New Zealand Book Award, and he has even appeared on the best-seller lists in his capacity as a ghost-writer or co-author. Every accolade and honorary degree he has won can be justified not only by the quality of his writing but through the sense one has that the tone of his poetry more precisely embodies the New Zealand character than does that of any of his more widely regarded compatriots or contemporaries, such as J.K. Baxter, Allen Curnow, C.K. Stead, Vincent O’Sullivan or Bill Manhire.

That tone is laconic, dryly humorous, resistant to convention, and consistently honest: his voice is that of a plain man setting down his views with all the clarity and precision he can muster. Turner’s poems do not waste words on rhetorical flourishes; when he employs figurative language or poetic devices it is only at the service of his content, though this should not be taken as implying that he is incapable of handling all the resources of form and language available to a poet when the content demands, say, metaphor or alliteration or a formal rhyme-scheme. His summary of the character of his nation comes early in the 2009 volume Just This:

I come from New Zealand.

Most people don’t know where it is

or what it stands for. Good.

Nor do most New Zealanders,

if they ever did. Sad.

All of us are islands, entirely lost,

pretending we are not.

Pretence and self-deception are qualities, or defects, he is acutely aware of, and his shorter poems often overturn the reader’s initial expectation by deflating the lyrical impulse:

There’s a bit battered

wool-buyer’s truck in Omakau

that has painted on a plate

hanging on the tailgate

the words “Nearly Honest Brent”.

That could stand as

a worldwide epitaph

and for reasons

inexplicable

I’m reminded

of my father’s

last words to me

which were not

“I did my best”, but

“the soup looks good”.

The one-word line “inexplicable”, here, has a force it would not achieve if it were to be set down as part of another line, or even if it were not an inversion of the conventional word order. Its unusual placement is a sign of Turner’s skill with the most difficult of all literary forms, which is free verse.

If these quotations illustrate the tone and economy of his writing, one does not have to go far in his book to discover an eye for striking detail, and a capacity for illuminating imagery:

When someone asks you to explain

what it’s like where you come from

you say you’re still finding out

and it’s not because you enjoy being

vague, or smart-arse, a sophist

if you like, it’s just because it’s true.

This morning frost then fog-like smoke

from a damp wood fire, then the sun

breaking through in lame-like patches

until there’s not even bandannas

left on the hills, and order’s restored:

blue sky above incandescent snow.

Turner’s poems are studded with physical description as evocative of wood smoke and snow-patched hills as this, just as they are redolent of stoic acceptance of reality (“just because it’s true”). The phrase “you’re still finding out” is, however, a more significant indicator of the way his poems proceed. In many of them the reader is able to sense the poet’s mind finding its way towards an idea that emerges in the course of the poem. Some poets set out with a preconceived notion that they intend to express; Turner, one feels, reverses this procedure by using poetry to discover and clarify the implications of thoughts, only half-conceived at the beginning, that arise out of his response to landscape or the social world.

Each of the excerpts quoted above is in fact a complete poem, but it is often in the longer poems that this process can most clearly be seen, whereby, as he phrases it:

You write, in part,

and mindful always

that all is qualification

until The End, to explain

yourself to yourself

and give others their due.

The landscape that he returns to continually is that of the Central Otago region of New Zealand’s South Island, where he lives “among / the grey, lichen-braised rocks, / the creamy, straw-coloured grasses”. The delineation of place, of its landforms and changing weathers and wildlife, is so vivid in his work that the reader is able to picture the country in the mind without further visual assistance, yet his latest book, Elemental (2012), which is subtitled “Central Otago Poems”, provides such assistance nonetheless.

This collection is, even before one considers its content, a masterpiece of book production. A selection both of previously published poems, from more than ten books, and of more recent pieces, it is handsomely illustrated by a series of magnificent photographs by Gilbert van Reenen. Poems and photographs complement each other without being simply illustrative, and while the poems on their own would be enough to make the book invaluable, the combination of poetry and photography is such as to make this an irresistible gift. The jagged mountains, the dry tufts of grass, “a curdle of sheep”, and rivers and fields familiar from the poems are pictured with rare photographic artistry.

Yet the photograph I enjoyed most is the one of the author in his shed, a wall of books stretching up to the bare roof-beams while he attends to his bicycle. Only Turner could have a library in his bike shed: one can understand this rare conjunction after reading his memoir Somebodies and Nobodies (2002). This eloquent book-length essay begins as a childhood recollection of life in a humble suburb of Dunedin where cycling was one of many daily preoccupations for an extended family of wise uncles, entertainingly eccentric aunts, modest yet hard-working parents, and resident grandparents.

It was a childhood of outdoor activities and sports, fishing, mountain-climbing and cycling as well as cricket, hockey and golf. The family may have been modest and the setting humble—“a state house in Corstorphine, a new government subdivision”—yet the three sons of Alf Turner, a bike mechanic who had “no formal education past primary school”, all rose to astonishing heights of success.

From a family of “nobodies” Brian, the eldest, became arguably New Zealand’s leading poet, while Glenn was unarguably (one cannot argue with statistics) the country’s greatest batsman, before Greg became its foremost golfer. It is as if one Australian family had given birth to Les Murray, Don Bradman and Greg Norman. Brian Turner himself played hockey at international level, cycled competitively, played cricket for Otago, and worked for years as a golf caddy. This was the outcome of the day when “a weird and wonderful household of sporting zealots had come to plague North Dunedin”. The Turner household was:

a marvellous mix of vitality, bigotry, experience, kindness, warmth, bile, humour and determination. It may not always have been couth, or cultured, but nor was it entirely uncouth. As for pretentiousness? Never, not a sign.

In summing up his childhood home thus, Turner also summarises both the book this passage appears in, and the entire body of his literary work. Somebodies and Nobodies ends with the author, in his twenties, about to depart Dunedin for “a new world, independence and books”, and leaves the reader hoping for a sequel.

Though he has been a regular contributor to this magazine, Brian Turner’s books have not been reviewed in Quadrant before because they have lacked a distributor in the traditional Australian book market; the advent of the internet, and of online booksellers, means that this restriction no longer applies. Anyone who takes the trouble to order any of the titles listed above will be richly rewarded.