Duckor-Jones’ second poetry collection begins with its title poem, satirising the humble-brag rhetoric so be-loved of politicians.

I care, oh my god I care /

I nature my mythologies as robustly as you shelter yours /

Send me to jail if you wish, for I’ll believe in anything /

But come election day do consider my singular story /

It’s a great opening and has all the qualities we’ve come to expect from the (now) Greymouth-based sculptor/poet. A mischievous sense of humour, a natural sense of line and rhythm and an imagination alert to the everyday revelations buried among the flotsam and jetsam that make up our lives. There are echoes of early Ian Wedde, Frank O’Hara, Ginsberg and Australian poet Ken Bolton, but Duckor-Jones’ voice is fresh and distinctive.

In the 12.55 to Masterton, Duckor-Jones overhears a couple talking on a train, there’s allusions to a funeral, a resentment, travel plans, a sense of much going unsaid. The poem is punctuated with two forward slashes which Ducker-Jones incorporates as a sound effect “to be read as “d-din””. That info’s not revealed until the notes at the end and going back and rereading the poem with that in mind adds another texture, the words alive to a moment in time.

Elsewhere the wonderful Night focuses on a boy picking at a piece of wallpaper by his bed as he falls asleep. The poem then moves, Maurice Sendak-like, through the boy’s dream arriving 25 years later in London — “a rodent’s haunch” — and the now young man wishing

“he could tear at London till it became the sort of problem

That could be repainted easily”

Magic, reality, loss, time’s passing — all in 22 lines. Superb.

There are poems here about Judaism, Bach (Duckor-Jones’ writes two poems to certain bars of Bach’s Allemande in G) misunderstandings at the supermarket, commuter musings and lust. Although Memory! finds our poet happier humming a tune in front of the fire than engaging in any kind of sex play

Everyone leaning across each other stroking all the dicks

Calling out to me, c’mon have a stroke of these dicks!

It’s nice!

&

….

I have learned

To hum

To pop a log on the fire even now with spring on the way

The collection also includes a number of entertaining “found” poems. Wage Advice is a hilarious mash-up of a Radio New Zealand interview with financial columnist Mary Holm and a complete list of Israeli prime ministers. Sage Advice utilises Duckor-Jones’ mum’s emails regarding the Talmud and Dedications borrows dedications and final lines from books found in a BnB.

But the highlight of this superb collection is the twenty-part The Embryo Repeats —the longer form allowing Duckor-Jones to stretch out and improvise around a theme — a theme he tackles many times in Party Legend — man’s relation to God. It’s a major poem that’s a lot more fun than that description suggests; one that seems as much self-interrogation as philosophical inquiry.

“/ C breathes God in & exhales horses cities planets mythology lust / amen / God’s informed position / amen / C eyeballs God, smooth & tidy as a nut / amen

In a 2018 interview with Paula Green, Duckor-Jones revealed that the “Big Boys” of American 20th century fiction — Hemingway, Salinger, Cheever and Carver — were among his favourites. Stating that “they’re most front of my mind when I sit down to write. Funny then, that what comes out are poems about birds, art, gay love.” But it’s this duality — ephemera, mash-ups, gossip on the one hand (True Stories has lines blacked out as if redacted) and a fearless, questing mind on the other that makes Party Legend such an enduring delight.

Reviewed by Greg Fleming