Harvey McQueen’s blog post on A Tingling Catch

My friend Harvey McQueen, poet and anthologist, writes a very good blog, Stoat Spring – the title comes from his poetic sequence published by Mallinson Rendel in the 1980s. Harvey’s blog features his own poetry and comments on poetry and books by others that he shares with his friends. Harvey made the following post about my cricket poetry anthology, A Tingling Catch, on Wednesday, 8 September 2010:

I’ve been reading and enjoying Mark Pirie’s ‘A Tingling Catch': A Century of New Zealand Cricket Poems 1864-2009. I’ve enjoyed watching the game down the decades, Lancaster Park, Seddon Park, the Basin Reserve. I’ve seen Walter Hadlee, Sutcliffe, Burtt, Motz, Richard Hadlee, Turner, Crowe et al down the years. Test matches are tests – of character, will, skill and ability.

It’s a hard game to explain though Harry Ricketts' How to Catch a Cricket Match does a fine job. In cricketing terms I’d call it a fine cover drive. Pirie begins with a poem from Brian Turner:
‘A game about which
you can know very little
and say anything
and be right sooner or later’

While Cyril Childs describes the progress of a cover drive.
'the speeding ball
rearranges the pigeons
         but slightly'

Geoff Cochrane’s poem 'My Elderly Father Watches Television’ rang very appropriately:
'How can he sit there enjoying the cricket
when there’s death to think about?'

Harvey McQueen

Thanks Harvey.