As a tribute to the late David Mitchell, this anthology of poets who have read at the various venues of Poetry Live! during the last 40 years is a treat. Mitchell was a charismatic figure still mourned and revered by those who knew him. He wrote some very adhesive, Sixties-stamped poems and, by setting up and initially running Poetry Live!, he offered two generations of (principally) Auckland poets a platform on which to perform in an unpredictable but semi-safe, non-academic environment.

I only got to know Mitchell slightly towards the end of his life when, very belatedly, he completed an English degree at Victoria University of Wellington. By then, he was in very shaky health, but always friendly and still had a damaged glamour about him. Fittingly, his poem Words opens the collection: “who / faces silence in fear // shout & dance & sing / some / song …” I wish I’d seen and heard him in his pomp.

The other 78 poems in the collection are bracketed at the front by poster images, a lively introduction by Genevieve McClean and an enthusiastic note by the editors, and at the back by several heartfelt reminiscences and a terrific excerpt from a 1982 review by Maxine Fleming of a typically eclectic Tuesday evening of readings at the Globe Hotel. (The latter contains a hilarious account of Michael O’Leary pretending to have forgotten the – in fact, entirely imaginary – poem he had supposedly intended to read.) The bracketing pieces in their different ways all help to conjure up what during the decades Poetry Live! evenings have been like and what they have meant to those who took part.

Fleming describes David Eggleton reading “like a racing commentator” and “romp[ing] around the stage like a boxer about to go into a fight”: a vivid evocation of Eggleton in his ‘Kiwi ranter’ mode. But, as his surging, metaphor-mix poem Auckland International Airport shows, he has always been rewarding on the page as well as the stage: “The paper lantern of Narita is a postcard, / a wildlife park of hotel, / a jumbo walloping through the bald, white savannah …”

And that’s the point with an anthology of poems. However compelling, surprising, convulsing, exhilarating, the poem may have been that evening in the pub, in that atmosphere, in that community of like-minded, sympathetic souls, eager to support a newcomer and/or enjoy a regular, typeface on the white page is far less hospitable. The white page loves language, too, of course, but the words have to do everything on their own. There’s no soundtrack of clinking glasses, no buzz, no laughter or applause, no sudden hush. There’s just the white page on which the words do or don’t work their magic.

Here some do (at least for me): Miriam Larsen-Barr, A Letter to My Grandmother (very poignant); Lynda Chanwai-Earle, Kiribati (elegiac); Jan Fitzgerald, Anthony Hopkins Posts on Twitter (quizzical); Sophia Wilson, Repeat (viscerally numbing); Jenny Clay, cross over and out; Michelle Chote, Le Voyage; Stu McGregor, Passing through Praza da Quintana; Edna Heled, Bare (quirky); Philip Muir, The Pause Within (an excellent shape poem with a hole in the middle); James Crompton, Live a Little (a thumping list); Vaughan Rapatahana, more (accomplished bilingual mesh); Siobhan Harvey, Waiata Tangi for Chris and Cru (lamented lost futures).

It takes nerve to get up and say your words to others, even in a supportive context. To have done it is an achievement. No doubt many of these poems had an impact delivered by that voice, in that space, on that night. But you had to be there.

Reviewed by Harry Ricketts

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