Tim Upperton’s third collection reads confidently: experience is in these pages, in form and language, as he draws us through poems that spin from Palmerston North to Paris, from Topeka to the moon, engaging with mundane life – “you can always find a park / just a short walk from where you want to go,” and the more philosophical “Bone is what carried the flesh / until it tired of carrying /and lay down.”

Despite the occasional segue into lighter ground, A Riderless Horse feels heavy. Preoccupations include climate change - “blame dairy cows” - and mortality “the cough / or something like it. It’ll get worse. It’ll say, enough,” but the most pressing and personal is the acknowledgment of self as not always acceptable, “the wrong life cannot be lived rightly / I should know,” and “how you wonder sometimes / if you’ve got it, the killer gene.” Entwined with this is the knowledge that one doesn’t always get what one deserves, “Hard truth is that you never asked for much / and got less.” While acerbic humour and snappy endings litter the collection, the darker depths grip hard and stay with the reader.

Small griefs is short but speaks of little disappointments, tiny deaths:

Small griefs

The way dead leaves thicken at the bottom of a treed slope
even when the trees are ever-green,
even on a gentle slope.

Reviewed by: Erica Stretton