Cricket poetry in the NZ Cricket Museum Newsletter

The latest edition of the NZ Cricket Museum Newsletter, Winter/Spring 2011, includes a series of cricket poems from A Tingling Catch, further information about the museum’s touch-screen interactive project and a prose piece by Madeleine Marie Slavick on Jonny Brugh’s one-man play The Second Test (also included on the Tingling Catch blog).

You can download the newsletter as a free PDF from New Zealand Cricket’s website.

The poems from A Tingling Catch were ‘The Record’ and ‘To Bert Sutcliffe, Master Batsman’ (my own poems), 'Ken Wadsworth' by Brian Turner, ‘Poet & Cricketer’ by Ron Riddell (for the late David Mitchell) and ‘A Tribute to R J Hadlee’ by Ian Donnelly.

A further poem of mine, ‘At the Basin’ for Daniel Vettori, first published by Joseph Romanos in The Wellingtonian, was also included.

Thanks to David Mealing at the New Zealand Cricket Museum for his work on this as well as the exciting new touch-screen interactive initiative.

The New Zealand Cricket Museum now has a new website too: http://www.nzcmuseum.co.nz/



NZ Cricket Museum Newsletter
Winter/Spring 2011

A Tingling Catch in NZ Cricket Museum Newsletter

A Tingling Catch was featured in the Summer/Autumn 2010/11 Newsletter from the New Zealand Cricket Museum. The cover has a nice pic of Brendon McCullum playing a graceful leg side shot.
Here's the link to the pdf that you can download for free from NZ Cricket's website:
http://www.blackcaps.co.nz/content/nzc/new-zealand-cricket-museum.aspx

Thanks to David Mealing, Curator of the New Zealand Cricket Museum, for this.

See also my related blog posts: 'David Mealing's Edible XI' and 'David Mealing's French Artists Cricket XI'.

New Zealand Cricket Museum
Summer/Autumn Newsletter 2010/11

Tim Jones's Poetry reads of 2010

Tim Jones named A Tingling Catch as a highlight of the year for Poetry on his blog entry "What I Read in 2010", 2 January 2011:

Poetry:The two books of poetry by individual authors I most enjoyed in 2010 were Jennifer Compton's collection Barefoot and Sappho: A Garland, translated and introduced by Jim Powell. Other favourite poetry collections for the year included Magnetic South by Sue Wootton, Spark by Emma Neale, and Ithaca Island Bay Leaves by Vana Manasiadis.

As for anthologies, cricket poetry anthology A Tingling Catch, edited by Mark Pirie, was a highlight of the year.

Here's the link: http://timjonesbooks.blogspot.com/2011/01/what-i-read-in-2010.html

Thanks Tim

A Tingling Catch mentioned on Cricket Web

Martin Chandler mentions A Tingling Catch on Cricket Web - "New Books: An Overview for December 2010", 26 December 2010. I'm pleased to get a mention here as the note at the bottom implies not every cricket book is picked up by their surveys. A further address suggests they may do reviews, so it could be worth my while sending them a copy. The link is: http://www.cricketweb.net/cricketbooks/6568.php

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.

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)

Helen Rickerby's blog post on A Tingling Catch

Helen Rickerby posted a blog comment on A Tingling Catch. Helen, a publisher herself with Seraph Press, was kind enough to look after the bookselling for me at the launch in the Basin Long Room. Here's the link to her post discussing Scott Kendrick's poem 'Catches I Have Dropped':
http://wingedink.blogspot.com/2010/11/tuesday-poem-catches-i-have-dropped-by.html
Look out for Helen's new Seraph Press title: Crumple by well known writer Vivienne Plumb.
Thanks Helen

Beattie's Book Blog post on A Tingling Catch

I was delighted to find the following post on A Tingling Catch on Graham Beattie's highly regarded "Beattie's Book Blog" (Saturday 30 October 2010):

'A Tingling Catch' is the first anthology of New Zealand cricket poems to be collected. It is where poetry meets the essence of cricket: bowling, batting, fielding, commentary, cricket watching and listening, accounts of famous matches and players, childhood cricket poems, social members of the game and lots more!
The result is a wonderful insight into the world of cricket from all levels and standpoints of the game that will have the reader tingling for the next catch from some of our best poets. I have so enjoyed reading their poems.
The anthology presents some of New Zealand literature's most well-known names (and some overseas authors), both past and present, featuring highly acclaimed and award winning poets and cricket writers such as Don Neely, Kevin Ireland, Michael O'Leary, Alistair Te Ariki Campbell, Brian Turner, Harry Ricketts, James Brown, Geoff Cochrane, John Clarke (aka Fred Dagg), Whim Wham, Denis Glover, Mark Pirie, Richard Langston, Bill Direen, William Pember Reeves, Elizabeth Smither, Anne French, David Eggleton, David Mitchell, Graham Lindsay, Thomas Bracken, Murray Edmond, Samuel Butler (England), Sir AP Herbert (England), Nick Whittock (Australia) among others.

More at: http://beattiesbookblog.blogspot.com/2010/10/tingling-catch.html

Graham also lists three of his favourites from the book:

ANTON VOGT

Sportsman

Eluding his opponent, knowledge,
He kicked and bowled his way through college;
And now that he has entered heaven,
He plays for Peter's 1st X1.

BRIAN TURNER

Cricket

A game about which
you can know very little
and say anything
and be right sooner or later.

HARRY RICKETTS

Epitaph for an old cricketer

Death's sharp offcutter

has bowled you though the gate.

Thanks Graham.

Richard King Writers v Publishers cricket match

One of the contributors to A Tingling Catch, Jeffrey Paparoa Holman informs me that the anthology will be on the prize list for the annual Richard King Writers v Publishers cricket match in the New Year. Richard King who died recently was an avid cricket lover and a well-known New Zealand publisher. He helped with Men in White, Don Neely's definitive history of New Zealand Test cricket, and is mentioned as one of its co-authors on the book jacket. We all owe Richard a debt of thanks for that, and for the many other books he helped bring into being. It's nice that A Tingling Catch will be on the prize list for this annual match. Thanks to Gillian Newman, Richard's partner, for thinking of the book. Jeffrey Paparoa Holman's new poetry book, Fly Boy, will be published soon by Steele Roberts Ltd in Wellington.

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.

The Lampstand article on A Tingling Catch

The First Ever Anthology of New Zealand Cricket Poetry

Wellington poet/publisher and Old Boy Mark Pirie (1987-91) has just brought out the first ever anthology of New Zealand cricket poetry, ‘A Tingling Catch’: A Century of New Zealand Cricket Poems 1864-2009.

The book to be released in September by Mark’s company HeadworX took Mark five years’ of research and extensive reading at both the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington and the Poetry Archive of NZ Aotearoa (http://poetryarchivenz.wordpress.com). He started work on the book in 2004 while he was compiling the first ever book of New Zealand science fiction poetry, Voyagers.

Voyagers, published by IP in Brisbane and co-edited with Wellington writer and editor Tim Jones, was the winner of Best Collected Work at the Sir Julius Vogel Awards this year and was considered one of the “Best 100 Books of 2009” in the New Zealand Listener.

Mark’s new cricket anthology contains much valuable and rare cricket material dating as far back as 1864. Poems by colonial poets feature amongst other elusive cricket gems from more recent times. Some of the finds of the book were poems by Robert J Pope (of the old Wellington and Star Cricket Clubs and a friend of Wellington College Headmaster J P Firth), William Pember Reeves, Thomas Bracken, Samuel Butler, Jim Tocker (of the former Old Collegians’ Cricket Club in Christchurch) and G P Williams. Don Neely, G Dewar and A E Sandford’s poems were found in the periodical NZ Cricketer published in the late ’60s and early ’70s.

Don Neely, local cricket historian and former Wellington captain, national selector and President of New Zealand Cricket, whose poem was an intro to a guest column for NZ Cricketer has also contributed the Foreword to the book in the form of another poem that was first published in The Summer Game: An Illustrated History of New Zealand Cricket. The poem ‘What is Cricket?’ was read earlier at the launch of Men in White in 1986.

Among the more well known poets in the literary world included are Allen Curnow writing as Whim Wham, Kendrick Smithyman, Alistair Te Ariki Campbell, Harry Ricketts, Brian Turner (brother of Glenn Turner), Alan Roddick (Landfall editor Charles Brasch’s literary executor), British politician and author Sir A P Herbert, Michael O’Leary, Elizabeth Smither, musician Bill Direen, and Campbell Live TV3 reporter Richard Langston.

Several college old boys feature such as Mark himself, Radio NZ National’s Jack Perkins and iconic ’60s poet David Mitchell. (David’s collection Steal Away Boy: The Selected Poems of David Mitchell was published this year by Auckland University Press.)

Mark has been a cricket enthusiast since he was a boy playing Junior cricket for Onslow Cricket Club, schoolboy cricket for Wellington College, and then senior social grade cricket for Hutt District Cricket Club (where he played a few matches for the senior reserves) and Wellington Collegians Cricket Club’s Axemen, a One-Day side.

In 2008 Mark published his own small book of cricket poems Slips, a collection of some of his best cricket pieces.

The book is distributed by Addenda Limited in Auckland and will be available from good bookstores nationwide. The best ways to obtain a copy are placing a special order with your local bookseller or visiting Unity Books in Wellington. RRP: $35.00.

(from The Lampstand, Wellington College Old Boys magazine, September 2010, p. 64)