The Outsider

Though I don’t usually put out two posts so close together, I wanted to post my poem “The Outsider”, which won second prize in the 2008 Bravado International Poetry Competition, as soon as Bravado 14 had appeared.

In Bravado 14, you can also find the other poems placed in the competition, “In a Field of Snow” by Michael Harlow (1st) and “Shoe” by Sue Wootton (3rd), plus the ten Highly Commended poems, plus other excellent poems and stories. Among those with work in this issue are Helen Lowe, Helen Lehndorf, Mary Cresswell and Michael Botur.

If this sounds like your cup of tea, check out the Bravado website for info on how to get a copy, subscribe, and submit.

The Outsider

He was Little Johnny Howard’s biggest fan
a man made from scriptwriters’ dead ends
and something like biltong, transplanted.

Glints from a narrowed eye bent the red dust backwards.
The cattle, hypnotised, crushed snakes
as dingoes ran panting for cover.

But even he could not defeat the sky.
Cracked and pitted, turned three-fifths to sand,
he rode into Toowoomba near closing time.

The streets devoured his bones. A green light
fires a hundred Holdens down his spine. A red light
floods the land with spinifex, like rain.

Reviews Roundup

I posted a while back on the first two reviews of my poetry collection All Blacks’ Kitchen Gardens. Several more reviews have now come in, and my fantasy novel Anarya’s Secret has received its first review, which you can read in the Earthdawn Live Journal.

All Blacks’ Kitchen Gardens reviews

In the New Zealand Herald’s Canvas magazine on 8 March, Graham Brazier gave favourable reviews to both All Blacks’ Kitchen Gardens and Johanna Aitchison’s A Long Girl Ago. Despite insisting on describing me as a young poet (well, I look young, but I have this really dodgy portrait hanging in the attic), Graham said some very nice things about the book, describing it as a standout among the recent flood of local poetry publications, and saying “each poem stands on its own merit, a polar opposite of its predecessor”. Given that Graham is the lead singer of New Zealand band Hello Sailor, it’s perhaps not surprising that he draws particular attention to “New Live Dates”, my poem about an aging rock star strutting his stuff one more time.

In Poetry New Zealand 36, Owen Bullock describes the book as “a second collection from this wry and insightful Wellington poet”. He focuses on those poems in the book which incorporate some reference to the rich and famous, such as “Fitness” and “Oprah Relents”, saying that “the results can produce a zen-like, frozen look at the ridiculous in life”.

In Bravado 12, Michael Lee is kind enough to say that the last line of the opening poem in the book, “Elfland”, makes his scalp tingle.He also notes the varied subject matter, and gives some extracts from his favourite poems in the book, concluding by saying that the book “gives us Tim Jones’s lively, poet’s mind”.

In the March issue of a fine line, the New Zealand Poetry Society newsletter, Joanna Preston is less keen: she calls the collection “uneven”, and particularly dislikes “Oprah Relents”. On the other hand, she does like “First Light” and several other poems, so it’s not all bad news.

So, three very good reviews and one less good one: that’s not too bad a ratio.

I’ll add links under “Sample Poems” on the left to those of the poems mentioned in this post that are available online. And here’s “Oprah Relents” – see what you think.

Oprah Relents

Oprah relents
allowing us food and water.

Her guards look on
as we wash off the grime.

The symphony of severed heads
demands a new movement.

In fifteen minutes
we go live.

This poem was first published in the New Zealand Listener, 2 July 2005, p. 42, and republished in All Blacks’ Kitchen Gardens.