Michael O'Leary’s Cricket Novel to be Reprinted

Michael O’Leary’s cricket poetry satires from his novel Out of It featured prominently in my anthology A Tingling Catch. Michael informs me he has decided to do a reprint in March 2011. Michael’s company Earl of Seacliff Art Workshop first published the book in 1987. Out of It is a novel/novella that remains a cricket cult classic. The book provides a moving and comic account of the disintegration of the protagonist's mind as he takes leave from everyday life to watch a One-Day cricket match and conjures a surreal game between New Zealand and an Out of It XI. The book includes a number of cricket satires/parodies that rank among the best written on the subject in this country. Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix bat against Richard Hadlee and New Zealand's great 1980s beige team on Eden Park. Read it to find out the outcome. Libraries in the main centres may still have copies for lending. Here’s a sample from Out of It, also included in A Tingling Catch:

MICHAEL O’LEARY

From The Ballad of Reading Oval

(Oscar Wilde)

Yet each man pulls the stumps on himself

By each let this be heard

Some do it with a simple French Cut

And with unflattering word

Cowardly commentators say ‘Played on!’

Cutting deeper than a sword

Some play careless strokes when they are young

And some when they are old

Some leave such a gap twixt bat and pad

That the ball, like an arrow of gold

Straight to its target blindly goes

Leaving the batsman out in the cold

Some hit too little, some too long

Some wait for an extra or a bye

Some leave the field almost in tears

And some without a sigh

For each man pulls the stumps on himself

Yet none can answer why

Poem © Michael O'Leary

Note: After Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’. Wilde is batting against New Zealand in a fictitious match from Michael O’Leary’s novel Out of It, ESAW, Auckland, 1987.