Brian Turner’s 2011 NZ cricket poem

Brian Turner (1944-2025) was one of our leading poets and a sport writer working on rugby books for Josh Kronfeld, Anton Oliver and Colin Meads. His interests included cricket and golf. His brothers are Greg Turner golfer and Glenn Turner, the New Zealand cricketer and Master Batsman. Brian was a New Zealand hockey rep and played cricket at U23 level.

Brian contributed a number of poems to A Tingling Catch, including poems on Ken Wadsworth the New Zealand wicketkeeper who died early and Glenn Turner.

I found he had written a new cricket poem in 2011 in his collection Inside Outside (VUP). I had correspondence with Brian for a number of years and last published him in my journal broadsheet in May 2022. He died suddenly in February 2025.

I will include his poem ‘At the Crease’ in the Tingling Catch archive.

BRIAN TURNER

At the Crease

Once past 60,
or thereabouts,
every day
seems like your debut
in a sport in which
your career
will be short.

Poem © Brian Turner

I wrote a rugby poem for Brian after reading the Inside Outside collection, it’s included in my book Sidelights (HeadworX, 2017):

MARK PIRIE

At the Try Line

For Brian Turner, after reading his collection, “Inside Outside”

I was thinking
how, in life, you’re
either ‘in’ or ‘out’,
or, as you put it,
Inside Outside.

And it’s best to be ‘in’.

Music, art, literature, sport,
love, work, fashion, politics;
it’s about success or failure,
riding them out, and as
Sean Fitzpatrick says,
“Winning Matters”.

At the try line, if you’re
not in, you’re out.

But you’re really
Inside Outside
all along.

Poem © Mark Pirie