Simon Boyce’s NZ cricket poems

One of the reasons for starting the Tingling Catch blog was to build an online archive of NZ cricket poems. Recently, I came across two cricket-related poems by Simon Boyce.

One of Simon’s poems is about his playing days (schoolboy cricket and senior club cricket) and the second poem is an elegy for a school friend and player of cricket. As the second poem only mentions ‘cricket bat’ in the last line, it may not count as a fully-fledged cricket poem but I’ll include it here for your interest. It’s a stirring elegy.

Upper Hutt editor, singer/songwriter and poet Tony Chad first published both of these poems. Tony Chad has been the long-serving editor of the Hutt Valley poetry magazine Valley Micropress since the 1990s and has organised the Upper Hutt Poetry Day readings for a number of years now. I was invited to read at two of them in 2004 and 2005. He has given many poets from New Zealand and overseas coverage during that time. I was pleased to see that Index New Zealand have fully indexed Valley Micropress. The saddle-stapled photocopied chapbook is a valuable resource for New Zealand poetry.

Here are Simon’s two poems and some biographical information:

SIMON BOYCE

Cricketing Capers, Old Boy

Many a time we’d be up for a contest

against the familiar Upper Hutt rivals.

But for some reason still unknown

my own form was awful away from home.

When a young Upper Hutt College team

trekked down the valley to face us

Hutt Valley High School fourth formers

I’d got my best ever figures (8 for not many).

On a return match after the 8-wicket haul

I bowled well for just two wickets

but my batting and fielding then got worse

against all the rival Upper Hutt colleges.

Scores of naught and four at St Pats

more ducks at Heretaunga

many matches at Whakatiki St
always featured my dropped catches.

Following a few post-school games

I retired after opening for Eastbourne

my batting average all the better

for not playing Upper Hutt anymore.

It was way back in the 1980s

and somehow I miss the contests.

But those Upper Hutt cricket old boys

also have a bit to thank me for.

(from The Poetry Olympics, ed. Tony Chad (Upper Hutt: Upper Hutt City Council, 2008)

Aspiring Guide

Just names under a photo of the

Cross Country team of 1984.

But you must have been quick

in your first year at our school,

Dave Hiddleston,

to be awarded a Blue.

Couldn’t traverse Virginia Lake,

I might have passed you in the

race up to Wellington College,

but we were running as a team.

You left after that year, for

bigger and brighter things,

a deep-felt ambition must have

created the aspiring mountaineer.

Not Just the Southern Alps,

but the pinnacle, Everest,

the 15th Kiwi to climb it,

and you guiding two others.

You were on TV news twice.

Alive, and talking of the risks;

then at the funeral – your Summer

objects – surfboard, old cricket bat.

(from Valley Micropress, Volume 8, Issue 5, June 2005)

Poems © Simon Boyce

Simon Boyce is a Wellington poet and publisher. He played club cricket briefly for Eastbourne Cricket Club. He has his own self-publishing venture, Wayside Press, in which he does very complex tomes on political history and government borrowing, with some photo-essays for light relief. He has a BA (Hons) from Victoria University of Wellington and PGDip Arts and MA from Massey University, and he has just finished the Diploma in Publishing (online) at Whitireia Polytechnic. Simon also says he has ‘a very large record collection (70s rock dinosaur) and growing NZ book collection, including NZ poets Brian Turner and Bill Sewell's The Ballad of 51 [about the 1951 waterfront lockout].’

Thanks Simon for sharing your poems

A Tingling Catch on NZ Poetry Society website

Cyril Childs tells me A Tingling Catch appeared on the haiku news section of the NZ Poetry Society's website. Here's the link: www.poetrysociety.org.nz/node/530

Cricket Poetry Anthology

A Tingling Catch (HeadworX, $35) is an anthology of cricket poetry - the first such collection in New Zealand - and is edited by Mark Pirie, himself a well-known poet. Launched at the [Long Room] at the Basin Reserve in Wellington on October 31, the book includes poems by Kevin Ireland, Brian Turner (well, of course!), Harry Ricketts, James Brown, John Clarke (yes, the John Clarke), Denis Glover, Richard Langston, Elizabeth Smither and David Eggleton.

Also featured are two tanka by André Surridge, two haiku by Tony Beyer and nine haiku (in three sets of three) by Cyril Childs. Howzat!  

cover drive
   the speeding ball
   rearranges the pigeons
         but slightly

- Cyril Childs

grandpa's garden plot
behind the pavilion
staked tomatoes
plump and shiny
the size of cricket balls

- André Surridge

galahs
on the sight screen
the batsman appeals

- Tony Beyer

(For readers outside New Zealand, “galahs” refers to people acting the fool. A galah is a pink and grey cockatoo native to Australia, noisy and mischievous. The bird is not found in New Zealand, but the term is.)

(Also for readers outside New Zealand, poet Brian Turner is the brother of former NZ Test cricketer and former NZ Test cricket coach Glenn Turner; John Clarke aka Fred Dagg.)

(From NZ Poetry Society haiku and tanka news page)

Thanks Cyril

A Tingling Catch in PANZA Newsletter

A Tingling Catch appears in the latest Poetry Notes Spring 2010 newsletter from PANZA (Poetry Archive of New Zealand Aotearoa). I am one of PANZA's co-organisers and members. PANZA reprinted my October blog post on J H E Schroder's New Zealand cricket poems. The newsletter can be downloaded from http://poetryarchivenz.wordpress.com/ Here's the contents:

The third issue of the newsletter from Poetry Archive of New Zealand Aotearoa is available now for download as a pdf. Inside Spring 2010, volume 1, issue 3: Mark Pirie on J H E Schroder’s New Zealand cricket poems; Rail poems by John Maclennan; classic New Zealand poetry by Walter Charman; Niel Wright on Mark Pirie as Romantic Satirist; new publication by PANZA member: ‘A Tingling Catch’: A Century of New Zealand Cricket Poems 1864-2009: an anthology edited by Mark Pirie; recently received donations; about the Poetry Archive.

The man who played cricket with Wilson Pickett

When I was putting together A Tingling Catch, I came across a number of poems I didn’t end up using for one reason or another. Here’s one I didn’t use. It’s by David Flynn, an American-based poet, and was published in New Zealand’s leading poetry journal, Poetry NZ – a magazine edited by poet/novelist/critic Alistair Paterson in Auckland. I felt as Flynn wasn't a New Zealand poet, New Zealand publication didn’t really qualify it for inclusion in A Tingling Catch. It’s a very enjoyable poem though and worth sharing here:

DAVID FLYNN

The man who played cricket with Wilson Pickett

Saturday night at the financial news annual ball in London,

the bureau employees in black tie and gown.

After a formal dinner,

a band ran onto the stage at The Brewery.

The men, middle aged every one,

wore gold lame jackets and sunglasses,

while two women sparkled in blue sequined dresses.

Soul revival.

The Commitments on a money gig.

Songs were Motown by the numbers:

Stop – the two women held their palms out like traffic cops –

in the name of love.

The face of Danny was glazed as he walked back and forth among the dancers in what he thought was dance, but what the employees thought was: Danny’s drunk again. His fiancé stood in one spot and danced, as it were, alone in her apartment. I had seen the foreign exchange specialist twice before: glazed in his kitchen trying to put together words to welcome me, and glazed while five of us stood during a Squeeze concert in Blackheath. A drunk. And a sad drunk at that. He didn’t smile, seemed not a Soul Man, and him only, say, twenty-five.

   By contrast, the summer before I sat in a Lewisham café when
Kevin, mid-20s, happened to park his mountain bike by the door.

Whatshisname, he greeted me.

Oh hi, I said, not remembering his name either.

A week before, the banker had joined us at an Italian place in the West End. He drank three beers before the waitress delivered the pizza. Keep ’em coming. You want a beer, David wasit? By closing, the waitress sang along with him: Olay olayolayolay, and the owner stayed late to cook us special slices, just like Kevin wanted.

On the train from Charing Cross to Lewisham Station he introduced women to men, men to women – Georgia wasit?, you know Timothy here? He’s just back from Spain – until strangers stood holding poles, slow dancing to the sodden sounds of Kevin the Drunk – When a man needs a woman. He knew two tricks, but they were popular. As long as he kept moving, the man would spread joy. But at the Lewisham cafe a more workaday banker smiled in his striped suit. When I looked down his mouth, through his throat, and inside his stomach, he still laughed and drank. He was saturated with silly.

A serious expression among the freckles: I never feel so British, he said, as when I play cricket. That’s the only thing I care about. I know who I am, you see.

Then suddenly: Waitress bring me another beer. Have you met Marshall here (introducing a pimple-faced man in the booth behind us)? He’s between girlfriends you know.

By the time Kevin died he would be responsible for half the marriages in Kent.

About midnight at the financial news annual ball

the baldfatsquat lead singer

– That’s the sound of the men

working on the cha-ain gang –

introduced his band.

The drummer was:

‘the man who played cricket

with Wilson Pickett’

– Mustang Sally,

you better slow that Mustang down.

Even the bureau manager with his grey hair

sort of danced with his wife.

The editor of exchanges (Footsie, Dax, etc.)

raised hell in heels,

and a correspondent,

who had talked European stock derivatives all night,

hopped round and round the parquet.

The next Monday they would be all-money again,

even Danny, poor man,

swirling down his private toilet,

while somewhere else in London

Kevin spent another two hours

with a waitress and her boss.

He was a Soul Man,

British style.

A long life for Kevin.

Poem © David Flynn 2007

(from Poetry NZ 35 guest edited by Owen Bullock (September 2007))

Joseph Romanos' article on A Tingling Catch

I was really pleased when one of my favourite sports writers, Joseph Romanos, asked to interview me for A Tingling Catch.

Meeting Joseph was a great experience. I’ve admired his sports column in The Wellingtonian for a while now, reveling at his almost encyclopedic knowledge of sports history. I like how Joseph resurrects forgotten sporting names, e.g. his ‘Top 10 All Blacks Hookers’ includes Hika Reid - a nice touch!

Joseph has written many books, including an autobiography of Martin Crowe and a lovely book on New Zealand cricket families.

Here is the article Joseph wrote on A Tingling Catch, which was accompanied by a nice photo of me at the Basin Reserve by Jim Chipp:

JOSEPH ROMANOS

A tingling collection of cricket poetry

Mark Pirie compares the works in A Tingling Catch, his collection of New Zealand cricket poems, to a cricket team.

"Like any team, there are a few greats and a few making up the numbers. You need them all," he said.

Pirie has produced what is believed to be the first national collection of cricket poems of any country.

With his dual loves of cricket and poetry, he was the right person to attempt this book.

He has been a keen cricket follower since his days with the Onslow junior cricket club and at Wellington College.

Pirie said he got into cricket in the 1980s when the one-day game was exploding.

"I got excited by the day-nighters, and by Lance Cairns hitting all those sixes. These days I follow test cricket more. It's more a game for purists."

Poetry has been a continuing influence in his life. He got into it, he said, through the lyrics of popular music. At university he studied arts and poetry. He became a DJ for Active 89FM and gradually turned his attention more towards poetry.

"People used to tell me I wrote good song lyrics and that I should put out a book, so I gradually got more involved in looking at lyrics in terms of poetry."

But pulling together the collection in A Tingling Catch was a massive undertaking.

"When I was younger I used to read some of Brian Turner's cricket poetry. And at university I was taught by Harry Ricketts, who was cricket-mad.

"That got me thinking it was possible to write cricket poetry. Under Harry Ricketts' influence I wrote some cricket poems as a student."

Since then his cricket poems collection has grown massively.

"I dug deeper. I'd go to the Alexander Turnbull Library and search key words, such as "cricket", "batsman" and "bowler".

"There are about 4000 New Zealand poetry books. I've probably read half of them, so I knew what to look for when I went back to them.

"Sometimes the searching got tedious. You'd go through 10 books and get one poem. But it's like walking along a stony beach and suddenly turning up a gem."

Pirie turned up at the Turnbull Library one day and asked for all the copies of New Zealand Cricketer magazine. "That got a few funny looks. But I turned each page of them and uncovered a few more. You have to do the work."

His favourites? "I like Brian Turner's sonnet about [wicketkeeper] Ken Wadsworth, who was so young when he died. It was read at his funeral."

One poem that had drawn much attention, he said, was Arnold Wall's World War I poem 'A Time Will Come'.

Pirie said cricket seemed to lend itself to poetry. "The terminology helps. All those descriptive words, such as `slips', `square leg', `covers', `sweeper', `silly mid-on' – they're a dream for a poet."

A Tingling Catch is 188 pages long, yet Pirie had to exclude many poems. And since his book was published, more have come to light.

"I've started a blog [Tingling Catch], and added new poems there."

About a dozen of Pirie's own poems are included.

One of the curiosities of the book is that there is work from many noted writers not normally associated with cricket, and occasionally not even with poetry – David McGill, Denis Glover, Elizabeth Smither, Kevin Ireland, Alistair Campbell, Peter Olds, John Clarke [aka Fred Dagg] and Kendrick Smithyman among them.

The earliest work is Samuel Butler's 'The English Cricketers', from a letter to The Press in 1864 about George Parr's touring team.

Even when Pirie had identified the poems he wanted to include, which took five years, it was another year before he gained copyright clearances. These included the front cover illustration of a cricket match at the Basin Reserve, drawn by Jocelyn Galsworthy in 2002.


Avid collector: Cricket poet Mark Pirie at one of his
spiritual homes, the Basin Reserve. Photo © Jim Chipp 



A Tingling Catch, by Mark Pirie (HeadworX), $34.99.

Article © Joseph Romanos

(From The Wellingtonian, 18 November 2010, p. 23)

Otago Daily Times review of A Tingling Catch

The following brief review of A Tingling Catch appeared in the Otago Daily Times last Saturday:

GAVIN McLEAN

Collection of cricketing poems delivers the goods

In my childhood it seemed that Dad’s transistor played undertaker in the summery garden, blaring out the sad tidings every summer in the days when New Zealand’s team was bowling fodder for the Windies, Australia, England and just about anyone else.

A Tingling Catch resurrects some of the names from 40 years ago along with some much earlier ones. Those bearded worthies include colonial politician William Pember Reeves, nationalists Thomas Bracken and David McKee Wright, and mid-20^th century poet and broadcaster Arnold Wall. The more recent poets include editor Mark Pirie, Brian Turner, Harvey McQueen, Kevin Ireland, David Eggleton, Elizabeth Smither, Michael O’Leary and (naturally) Harry Ricketts.

Pirie organised his book thematically around topics such as players, matches and tours, songs, satires and parodies, watchers and listeners, and social cricket.

I particularly enjoyed Michael O’Leary’s contributions. In ‘Hey man, Wow!’ O’Leary has Jimi Hendrix batting against New Zealand. Two pages on, Bob Marley is also batting:

Is it four, is it four, is it four

That I’m scoring

Is it four, is it four, is it four

That I’m scoring

Later he has the poets out on the pitch, Lord Byron, Oscar Wilde and James K. Baxter.

Many poems recall personal experiences, or tributes such as Brian Turner’s to Ken Wadsworth or Harry Ricketts’ ‘Epitaph for an old cricketer’:

Death’s sharp offcutter

has bowled you through the gate.

Old controversies are resurrected, none more infamous than the great 1981 under-arm bowling incident, with Whim Wham (Allen Curnow) poking fun at Rob Muldoon and Malcolm Fraser’s verdicts on the Chappells’ sportsmanship.

I’m no expert, but I felt that Mark Pirie has judged line and length just right. A Tingling Catch offers a crowded gear-bagful of work and is well-supported by explanatory notes and a thorough index of poems.

Dr McLean is a Wellington historian and reviewer

(from Otago Daily Times, Saturday, 13 Novembe 2010, p. 53)

Gregory O’Brien’s NZ cricket poem

When I published A Tingling Catch, I knew I wouldn't find every cricket poem written in New Zealand. Here’s a great one that got away.

Gregory O’Brien told me he once wrote a cricket related poem-letter to a friend Nicholas Jones while taking his son Jack-Marcel Haddow to the Basin Reserve. It was first collected in O'Brien's 7 Letters (Animated Figure, 1997 [a limited edition of 36 copies]) and later anthologised by Andrew Johnston and Robyn Marsack in Twenty Contemporary New Zealand Poets (VUP, 2009).

O’Brien comments:

‘Whole forgotten days' is an informal letter-poem, the manner of which owes a lot to Baxter’s poems from his late Jerusalem period. In the early 1980s I spent a year or two in Sydney, where I started avidly reading the Australian poets Laurie Duggan and Ken Bolton...This poem is part of an ongoing correspondence with those exemplary figures (TCNZP, p. 118).

The poem appeals to me as cricket is often the backdrop for the poem and at the same time, the metaphors of cricket are behind the life-actions of the people in the poem. The humorous portrait of ‘a day at the Basin’ is expertly painted. The poem shows in profound ways how cricket affects people’s daily lives:

GREGORY O’BRIEN

Whole forgotten days

A letter to Nicholas Jones concerning a day spent with Jack-Marcel

Haddow and Anand Gaskin at the Basin Reserve

A fine day for the cricket. Which means for everyone

apart from the poor fool who has to fetch these balls,

which probably means

     me. The fanaticism of children is what amuses

then frightens me. After all we're only watered down

versions of them, perched on the edge of the

non-members stand between two beer cans, reading a book

about the Australian painter Brett Whiteley, about whom

I am, like my two accomplices, m two minds. Or, more

appropriately, a

grandstand of minds. (Apart from 'The Cricket Match' -1964 –

           which is a great painting.)

The trouble surrounding yourself with small children

is you find yourself

   in the First Eleven

without even knowing the rules, then spend your summer

there. As well as bowling the best balls

children spin the best lines ... Jack-Marcel last month

                    aimlessly

orienteering in the wilderness at Port Waikato

'miles from the nearest adult' -

       some of the children got so lost they actually found themselves

in suburbs. The thing about getting lost, he says, is

what you discover ... The year ends, children walk past

the front wall of our property, grabbing the flaking paint

then continuing down the road, peeling strips

     the length of the wall, like streamers,

ribbons, while we lie a few feet away on our well-tended lawn,

talking with our neighbours who were once 'reliably' informed

           a layer of old carpet was just the thing

to enrich their garden soil, only to discover

           later it had to be

wool carpet. For years now they have been unearthing nylon

from their garden, along with patches

     of lino. Another year, another ill-founded theory.

Heroic moths of the mind! I had every reason to exclaim, the day

a moth flew into my ear drum, went crashing around

the left hemisphere of my brain (the same morning

there was a sparrow inside the house,

   beating against the front window)

and later the doctor's predictable remark, 'we could just sit here

and wait for it to fly out the other ear', before finally

floating the intruder out on a tide of

warm wax. A time of marvels - Jack-Marcel present at the birth of his

sister: 'the amazing thing, you know, was

it was so

realistic’. The best lines, as someone else said, are ours

on loan. Or ours alone? My nieces are back home

in Rarotonga, clinging to an atoll, enjoying the weather,

the odd, distant explosion. They do not write

                 but send teeshirts.

In Zimbabwe, according to Jack-Marcel, you're more likely

to be hit by lightning

    than die in a road accident. Which makes

cricket a hazardous sport, and brings us back around

to the Basin Reserve like a Mexican Cheer circling the ground

followed by carloads of hoodlums. Then queuing outside the

Baxter's Caravan for a filled roll, half expecting James K. to

hand it over. A role he could fill,

                   you would have laughed -

like my mother who, every time a rubbish truck drove past

would say, 'Greg, that's the kind of job you could do.'

Late afternoon, a shadow

crosses the lawn: the crowd on the embankment

standing. Then, Just as suddenly, it is earlier in the day

again. Between the last ball of the over and

the end of the over. The moth that flew into my ear last

week, the experts inform me, I should have seen it coming,

          should have fielded

that one. And even if Chris Cairns says cricket is his religion,

you'd like to think it meant more to him

than that. The day ends, but the questions remain

like what was the score and

      who were we

                 playing?

During the break, I follow the two boys across

the in-field for signatures, mob someone I have never heard of

as clouds shuffle about on the grandstand roof and

the play of rain on the pitch

    ends play.

December 1995

Poem © Gregory O’Brien

(from Twenty Contemporary New Zealand Poets, selected by Andrew Johnston and Robyn Marsack, VUP: Wellington 2009)

  

TCNZP = Twenty Contemporary New Zealand Poets