Mark Pirie’s new cricket book Poets XI published

In October 2026, I released my new cricket book Poets XI. Here’s the book info: 

About the book

Poets XI compiled by Mark Pirie cricket poet and editor and published by Earl of Seacliff Art Workshop is a collection of poems and unusual cricket XIs published to commemorate the Poets XI at the Longroom Basin Reserve, Sunday 31 October 2010.

Cricket historian and writer Don Neely launched the book.

The Earl of Seacliff himself was the MC at the event.

Pirie selected a team of poets on the day that had attended his launch of the book A Tingling Catch at the Basin. Poets are: Nicola Easthope, Tim Jones, Harry Ricketts, Michael O'Leary, John Ansell, Nelson Wattie, Niel Wright, David McGill, Richard Langston, Don Neely and Mark Pirie the captain.

An appendix offers some of the New Zealand literature XIs made by writers over the years. 

Poets XI is a unique piece of cricketing memorabilia.

The cover features a photo by Madeleine Slavick of Don Neely crossing the Basin taken at the event.

Poets XI is available internationally online at lulu independent bookstore Shop the Indie Online Bookstore | Lulu.

Anonymous 1919 NZ cricket poem

The following humorous soliloquy based on Shakespeare’s play Hamlet was sent in to me by an Australian researcher who came across it whilst reading Papers Past at the National Library of New Zealand.
It was first published in the New Zealand Free Lance and appears to be a New Zealand cricket poem. The editor of the column published it with the following note: “The following item after William Shakespeare has not been hitherto published, but it is worth a place in my columns:--”
Cricket poems after Shakespeare are popular in cricket poetry. A Tingling Catch includes Don Neely’s ‘To walk or not to walk: that is the question;’ also after Hamlet. Don’s poem was written as an introduction to his cricket column in New Zealand Cricketer, 14 December 1970, on whether a batsman should stay or walk after appearing to have nicked a caught behind chance.
This poem is about a leg-before decision. I’ll include the anonymous writer’s poem here for your enjoyment.

ANON

Out Or Not Out

(Showing Hamlet’s latest soliloquy on being given out leg-before when
playing for Denmark against an eleven from the adjacent States)

Hamlet – Am I out, Horatius?
Horatius (batting at the other end) – I fear so, sire; methinks I heard
the man say “Chuck her up.”
Hamlet (retiring): Then must I go.
Yet ’tis a monstrous thing
That all this great and momentous issue
Should hang upon a churlish umpire’s nod.
How now, my lords? The ball had bias on it,
And, if my leg had been in front, as ’twas not,
’Twould ne’er have hit the sticks – no, not by yards.
It did not pitch straight – it was rising high –
Besides the man is bowling round the wicket;
Yes: I can summon up a million reasons
Which, on being pondered on, conspire to show
The verdict of yon purblind idiot false.
Well, well:
The thing’s an allegory,
How accident doth wait on carefulness
And all precautions used. I took one leg;
I wisely questioned if my toes were clear.
And all for this. Oh, sirs, the pity of it!
I was firmly set
As any oak tree in the sylvan glade;
I saw the bowling well; the ball appeared
To me as large as the full harvest moon
Sailing above the strawstack. I had meant
To score a hundred when that echoing yell,
Both from the bowler and the wicket-keeper,
The pre-arranged duet of knavery,
Checked me in mid-success and cut me down.
What weak-kneed umpire could resist that roar?
There’s not a doubt on’t. I was bustled out.
Give me a pipe; I’ll drown my grief in smoke.
This cricket is a passing beastly game.

(From New Zealand Free Lance, Thursday 20 February 1919, page 21)

A Tingling Catch on Sky Sport

A Tingling Catch: A Century of New Zealand Cricket Poems 1864-2009 edited by Mark Pirie (published by HeadworX) will appear on "National Bank Cricket Company", Sky Sport 1 (New Zealand channel), Thursday 24 March 2011, tonight, at 7.30pm.

I was interviewed for the show at the NZ Cricket Museum, Basin Reserve, along with cricket historian Don Neely (who wrote the foreword) and Radio NZ National's Jack Perkins reading poem excerpts from the book and talking about the poems that were read. It's a short segment so not all of the material recorded will be used.

The show will be shown several times and is replayed on Sky Sport channels. Go to http://www.skysport.co.nz/ and check the Sky TV guide for more details.

Richard King cricket match cancelled

In October I stated that A Tingling Catch would be on the prize list for the annual Writers v Publishers cricket match, played in memory of the late publisher Richard King and co-author of Men in White with Don Neely and Francis Payne. The game was scheduled for 13 March 2011 in Christchurch but because of the earthquake the game has been cancelled.

See my related October 2010 blog post 'Richard King Writers v Publishers cricket match'.

Jack Gallichan’s WWII NZ cricket poem

On Saturday, I wrote about the cricket haiku of Cyril Childs. Here’s another poem that Cyril sent me recently. It is has been published in a book by David McGill as Anon but it is almost certainly written by Jack Gallichan, the editor of the 197-page POW (Prisoner of War) souvenir book, Tiki Times, where the poem also appears. It may not count as a cricket poem as it only mentions cricket in one stanza (‘Willow swinging, wand-like’) but it’s worth including here as it offers a portrait of New Zealanders at war, in this instance a POW camp, where they played cricket to pass the time. Cyril says:

It was written by a NZ POW during WWII, almost certainly in Italy, and is published in David McGill’s book, P.O.W. - The Untold Stories of New Zealanders as Prisoners of War (Mills Publications, Lower Hutt, 1987), and the source is given as “Sergeant Burfield-Mills’ diary”. Burfield-Mills served in the RMT unit of 2NZEF. He was captured and was a POW in Italy until he escaped in late 1943.

  The same poem, with minor alterations appears in Tiki Times - a post-war collection of handmade weekly newspapers created by NZ POWs and posted on a barracks’ wall in E535 Milowitz through the second half of 1944 and early 1945. E535 was a coal-mining POW work camp associated with Stalag VIIIB. The driving force and editor of Tiki Times was Jack Gallichan who is shown as author of the poem. (Gallichan’s brother played cricket for NZ. He was, I think, on the tour to England in 1937.) Gallichan had been a POW in Italy before being transferred to E535, and is likely to have been in the same camp in Italy as Burfield-Mills. My uncle, Cyril Crosland, was in E535 from mid-1943 to January 1945.

Tiki Times is available in some libraries. There is a copy in the Turnbull Library in Wellington and the Hocken Library in Dunedin and Cyril bought a copy on Trade Me recently. Here is the version by Jack Gallichan from Tiki Times:

JACK GALLICHAN (c 1944-45)

Now and Then

Foreign skies that stretch above us,

Foreign soil beneath our feet.

Days we spend in patience waiting

For the joys of civvy street.

Guarded prisoners, while the hours

Slowly gather in the past,

Waiting for the day approaching

When freedom comes to us at last.

Miles unwinding, troopships leaving,

Bluegreen seas in foaming wake.

Drawing near snow-topped Egmont,

Shores where Tasman surges break.

Sunshine by the green sward resting,

Flannels and a match well fought.

Willow swinging, wand-like bringing

Cricket’s graceful, stately sport.

Tight-packed scrummage, forwards heaving,

Rugby fans’ excited roar.

Good clean hooking, back line racing,

Five-eights cutting through to score.

Waiting? No, we don’t mind waiting,

While the slow hours passing by

Lead us on to happy sport time,

Peace time, lads, for you and I.

Cyril notes further: ‘It does typify the New Zealand POW very well - captive, yes; but not defeated, still with spirit.’

Jack Gallichan’s brother was cricketer Norman Gallichan (1907-1969). Don Neely informs me that he was a ‘towering figure for Manawatu in Hawke Cup cricket before WWII’. His Hawke Cup stats were 177 wickets at 11.59 and 1,409 runs with a highest innings of 142 and an average of 32.76. He played one Test for New Zealand on the 1937 tour to England (where he was a late inclusion). Double international and All Black halfback Curly Page captained the team. Gallichan also played for New Zealand against V. Y. Richardson’s Australian XI at Auckland, 1928.

Gallichan was a right-hand batsman who made scores of 30 and 2 in his only Test appearance and he was a six-foot tall left-arm slow bowler. Gallichan’s innings of 30 played a part in New Zealand posting 281 in their First Innings in reply to England’s 358 at Old Trafford (Second Test). Walter Hadlee made 93. Gallichan took 3-99 from his 36 overs in the England First Innings, including the wicket of Wally Hammond clean bowled for 33 and two tail-enders. Jack Cowie also took 10 wickets – the first time a New Zealand bowler had taken 10 wickets in a Test Match. New Zealand still lost by 130 runs after being bowled out in their Second Innings run chase. Walter Hadlee noted in his Foreword to Men in White: ‘..we failed to grasp the opportunity of winning the Old Trafford Test by dropping Freddie Brown four times. That additional batting time allowed the wet pitch to dry out and the off spinner Tom Goddard bowled us out.’

Gallichan had a very useful tour average of 59 wickets at 23.94 from 18 games.

Article © Mark Pirie 2011

(Sources: Email from Cyril Childs; P.O.W. - The Untold Stories of New Zealanders as Prisoners of War by David McGill (Mills Publications, Lower Hutt, 1987); Tiki Times: a souvenir booklet of the camp newspaper for prisoners-of-war who were at E535, Milwitz, Upper Silesia, between July 1944 and January 1945 edited by J. Gallichan; assistant editor, P.R. Earle; art editor, M.B. Wallace (Palmerston North [N.Z.]: Keeling & Mundy, Printers, 1950); email conversation with Don Neely; Wisden Almanack 1970 [Obituaries for 1969]; and Men in White by D.O. Neely, R.P. King and F.K. Payne (Auckland: Moa Publications, 1986))

Liam Ferney’s Australian cricket poem

When I was in Brisbane for Subverse: Queensland Poetry Festival in 2000 and 2001, I met the young Australian poet Liam Ferney.

I can’t remember now how cricket came up but it soon entered our conversation. Liam was talking about having seen the New Zealand cricket team practicing in Brisbane. He liked Stephen Fleming of the New Zealand batsmen. Liam had the task of introducing my session at Subverse 2001. He also had the task of picking my fellow colleagues and me up from the airport. It's nice to get a ride when you don't know where you're going.

When I was editing JAAM magazine, I published a cricket-related poem by Liam. It’s an unusual poem. It plays with history using baseball and cricket. Baseball star Babe Ruth has an epigraph at the start and with mythical cricket figures Don Bradman and Harold Larwood (from the Ashes’ Bodyline series) appearing as baseball players recreating history:

LIAM FERNEY

The Sultan of Swat

‘Why don’t you read the papers?

 It’s all right there in the papers.’

                                    — Babe Ruth

Waking, wiping the

sleep from his eye, he

reaches for his pills.

Reading the label on the bottle:

it seems to say:            

‘don’t try too hard just

             let it carry you’ –

             like… a river, he finishes,

                        the sentence and his pills.

It’s prescribed like this

because mythology inadvertently

gets mixed up in the games

of chinese whispers

                                    we play with our history.

Drunk on fairy floss and beer

the story they’re telling in

Sideshow Alley is that Don Bradman,

fulfilling a promise to a

terminally ill child,

points straight back over

            Larwood’s head at a spot

      somewhere in centre field.

Winding up Larwood

          gives it everything he’s got,

   to the screaming ecstasy and

spilt beer of the Chicago fans,

            but  even as the ball leaves his hand

      Bradman’s eyes are fixed upon it and,

                  with a flick of his wrist,

            he sends it soaring out of

                          Wrigley Field.

Larwood, sticky with humiliation,

imagines a ball rocketing into

the soft-flesh of the batsman’s

helmetless head as he walks

back to his mark.

Bradman, luxuriating in the profanities

and abuse he has evoked

watches an angry fan hurl a cup

of beer onto left field and spits

nonchalantly just missing the fielder

at short leg.

Larwood turns and Bradman, like

            a brave Achaen points back

      prophetically to the same spot.

    The bowler runs in like a fierce

       bull charging through the streets

  of Pamplona and digs it in short,

              a spear jagging up sharply,

    but our Achilles has wiser eyes than this

         stepping backward and away,

                        hooking awesomely

the ball

                seems to climb

to the sun.        

                       

The news story is packaged thus:

The footage of the shot

from a variety of angles,

an interview with humble Bradman,

fans saying how he’s the greatest

the world has ever seen and

then the fadeout:

the small child smiling from

his hospital bed,

this miracle breaks hearts

for joy at dinner tables

nationwide.

A kid finds one of the balls out in the street.

He hides it away in a box,

and forgets about it for years

until one day, for no reason

     that he can name,

  he starts to take it out at nights

and let its elegant stitching

   take him back to the cutgrass

    summer twilight that now

seems so important.

It is a fact:

    The Bambino grows in deed and

    stature with every passing year.

Poem © Liam Ferney

Liam went on to publish his debut poetry collection, Popular Mechanics, through Interactive Publications in Brisbane, 2004. He appeared in Best Australian Poems 2010 and was editor of Cordite Poetry Review 17-23 in Melbourne and guest editor of issue 34.

Cricket historian Don Neely once commented to me that if it wasn’t for rounders which became baseball, cricket would’ve swept across America in the 19th century. This makes Liam’s poem even more interesting. The US played Canada in 1844, the first ever international cricket match at the St George’s Cricket Club, Bloomingdale Park, Manhattan.

Baseball became popular during the American Civil War and cricket waned. Americans have never really gotten the gist of cricket since that time though more Americans today play cricket thanks to Indian and Sri Lankan communities in America. NZ played Sri Lanka in a one-day series in Florida recently. In LA, the Compton Cricket Club (“the Homies and the Pops”) has a colourful history since the mid-90s. They have even released cricket rap singles. Check out their page on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compton_Cricket_Club

In Jan-Feb 2011, Compton Cricket Club will tour Australia, the first American cricket club to tour there.

There is now an American cricket magazine, American Cricketer, worth checking out as well: http://www.americancricketer.com/

Article © Mark Pirie 2010

(Sources: Wikipedia – the free encyclopedia; conversation with Don Neely; JAAM 15 (JAAM Publishing Collective, May 2001))

Don Neely in the New Years Honours list

In the New Years Honours list announced yesterday, I was pleased to see Don Neely's name. Don received the MNZM for services to cricket.
I'd like to congratulate Don on his latest achievement. Don had previously received an MBE.
In 2010, Don published an amazing cricket book, The First 50 Tests, to commemorate the first 50 Tests played at the Basin Reserve, Wellington. Financed largely by fund-raising, Don printed six thousand copies which were given away mostly to school cricket teams in Wellington and some around the country and to ticket holders at the Basin Test against Australia last March. Tim Jones reported being in a long queue at the Basin when he waited to pick up his copy.
The book is another of Don's extraordinary achievements for cricket in New Zealand. The Scoreboard at the Basin is named after him.
Don is a former Wellington captain and national selector and was the previous President of New Zealand Cricket.
In 1986, Don published his definitive history of New Zealand Test cricket, Men in White, co-authored with Richard King and statistician Francis Payne.
With his wife, Paddianne Neely, he co-authored, The Summer Game: An Illustrated History of New Zealand Cricket. His other work includes 100 Summers, a history of Wellington cricket, and editing the DB Cricket Annual series.
My own cricket anthology, A Tingling Catch, wouldn't have been possible without Don's involvement, including his foreword contribution and help with launching the book at the Basin Reserve Long Room last October.
Thanks Don for all you do for New Zealand cricket.

See my related blog post from last year 'A Tingling Catch launched at the Basin'

Terry Locke's review of A Tingling Catch

The following review by Terry Locke appears on his website “Hyperpoetics”, an introduction to New Zealand poetry through reviews of New Zealand poetry books. Here’s the link: http://www.hyperpoetics.ac.nz/Genres/LockeReviews/TinglingCatch.htm

Terry Locke, who teaches English Language Education at the University of Waikato, is a New Zealand anthologist and poet himself and edited two excellent poetry anthologies for New Zealand secondary schools in 2000: Doors and Jewels in the Water.

TERRY LOCKE

Review of A Tingling Catch: A Century of New Zealand Cricket Poems 1864-2009

You’ve got to hand it to Mark Pirie. Yet again, he has shown outstanding entrepreneurship in bringing out the first anthology of New Zealand cricket poems. As the blurb suggests, this book includes poems from 1864 to the present, grouped under categories of “Plays”, “Players”, “Matches and Tours”, “Songs, Satires and Parodies”, “Watchers and Listeners”, “Boys’ Songs”, and “Social Members”. The game commences, not with the toss of a coin, but with an appropriately poetic “Foreword” from New Zealand cricket writer, Don Neely – first read by him at the launch of Men in White in 1986. Here are a few lines from it, just to set the scene:

it is as tangible as a new scoop-bat and as intangible as a warm sunny morning;
exciting as a full-throated appeal, serene as an umpire’s answer.
It is competition, composure, memory, anticipation.

It is appropriate, I think, that cricket should be the sport to be honoured by the first sporting anthology in the New Zealand setting. Cricket has always had a certain mystique and a high degree of cultural resonance. Women were playing cricket before they were playing rugby and yes, despite the heading “Boys’ Songs”, there are references to women’s cricket in this book and also poems by women.

English Departments could do worse than have a copy of this book in the departmental library, despite the fact than many of the poems here are somewhat leaden, with some having the sense of having been written to order to flesh out the pages of the anthology. However, there are riches here also and some gems which Pirie has discovered and made available to readers. He has also done readers a great service in the various contextualising annotations he has made to poems referencing this or that player or match.

Let me share a few thoughts that occurred to me as I read this book. Firstly, there is the interesting spin (the obviously metaphor) that is found in historical poems in relation to what I might call the “commonwealth” theme.  There are some fascinating poems to be found related to this in the section “Matches and Tours”. G. P. Williams, termed by Pirie a “colonial” poet, has a poem about the final day of “England v. Australia”, a match played at the MCG and won by England thus allowing them to win the Ashes. Here are the final four lines:

Hurrah! For the winning and losing team –
Australians are English in all but the name;
In fondness for cricket we’re both the same.
Here’s to the noble old English game!

How would a post-colonial critic deal with this??!  Even more fascinating, from a politico-cultural point of view, is Thomas Bracken’s poem, “Sons of the giant islands of the South”, read by the author at a reception at Dunedin’s Queen Theatre in 1891 to welcome the Australian touring team (which beat Otago by 44 runs, but that is unremarkable). What is remarkable is the following sentiment of Bracken’s:

Ye are the heralds of those coming days
When on one flag one starry cross shall blaze
And float above the sunny lands that rest
In peaceful beauty on Pacific’s breast...

By anyone’s standard, this is awful verse, but the idea is remarkable. We already have an inkling that Bracken views Australasia as a single political entity in the title. Poms, Aussies and Kiwis are all happy brothers under the skin! And thank God for cricket, the gluey icing on the cake (or pavlova) which holds us all together.

What actually is a cricket poem? Well, most obviously, you’d think that a cricket poem was in the first place a cricket narrative, telling the story of a brave cricket deed (as per Mark Pirie’s poem about Bert Sutcliffe’s heroic stand against South Africa in 1953 when he returned from hospital, head bandaged, to play the innings of his life) or sharing a feeling about some aspect of the game. But there are poems here where cricket is very much the backdrop, part of the mise-en-scène where something far more significant is going on.

Probably my favourite poem in the book is David Mitchell’s “gasometer/ponsonby”. (He’s up against well-known poets such as Kevin Ireland, Brian Turner, Denis Glover, Murray Edmond, Elizabeth Smither and David Eggleton, by the way.) Mitchell has quite a presence in this book. He is the most significant cricketer/poet in our little pantheon. And he is the one person who has both written a poem about cricket in this book and has had a poem written about him, i.e. Ron Riddell’s “Poet & Cricketer”. Mitchell was no mean batsman and a stalwart of the Grafton Club, which has its headquarters at Victoria Park in Auckland. The “gasometer” in his title is both a literal reference to a nearby gas tank, but also a suggestion that this is a poem that is going to exploit metre. And it does:

down where the gaswerkes onlie rose
blows high or low on college hill
& underneath the oak boughs there
where sunlight & where time stand still
3 gummy old dags were wont to greet
with purple meths, new winter’s ill...

The cricket enacted on the Victoria Park green, of which Mitchell was undoubtedly a participant, is background to their story, which can only be speculated on by the writer:

reclining on a council bench
or clustered, stricken, on the grass
saluting late summer’s cricketers
with plastic bottle and paper glass...

The poem which follows is a reminder of how well Mitchell could write, even when he is in some ways using mock heroic to take the literary piss:

o was it bhudda, was it allah
was it world war three?
or just ian chappell
& dennis lillee?

fooles alone and poets would ask
would make request
the question begs: the beggars quest
the singers fail; the toilers rest
& the sun goes down
on their final test

& all this summer though I have kept watch
each Saturday when stumps are drawn
I have not seen them reappear
& the groundsman says simply
“the meffos? they’re gone
...gone.”

In short, among the doggerel and dross, you cannot fail to win the toss, and getting this will prove no loss, nor weight you like some albatross.

Review © Terry Locke 2010

Thanks Terry

Beattie's Book Blog - Launch of A Tingling Catch

Graham Beattie posted a very good report of the launch of A Tingling Catch. He also included Don Neely's launch speech and some photos. The link is
http://beattiesbookblog.blogspot.com/2010/11/tingling-catch-launched-at-basin.html

Thanks Graham.

Madeleine Marie Slavick - A Tingling Day

Here's comment on the launch of A Tingling Catch from Madeleine Marie Slavick:

MADELEINE MARIE SLAVICK

A Tingling Day

Springtime, Sunday. We see him in a field of grass, of thoughts. Don Neely is alone, except for a few stray pigeons and one empty bottle, which he picks up. ‘This is my second home,’ he says, walking in from the middle of the gloriously green Basin Reserve, one of the most famous cricket grounds in New Zealand.

Paddianne Neely walks the inside rooms in much the same way. She leads me through photographs of test matches she and Don have compiled, and mementos of the various teams around town. All the while, she straightens a frame or two.

Springtime, Sunday, but I walk through Basin Reserve almost every day as I go into town. I choose it for the burst of green, the hills beyond, the open wind. And for the love of sport, for the way it urges us to be our best.

Curator David Mealing loves cricket for the aesthetics, poet Harry Ricketts for the story, journalist Richard Langston for the ‘mind on mind’, and with the publication of ‘A Tingling Catch’, anthologist Mark Pirie can acknowledge many great things at once: New Zealand cricket, poetry, his hometown of Wellington, and his team of 75 writers.

‘A Tingling Catch’ is the first anthology of New Zealand cricket poems (and songs), representing almost 150 years of cricket history. It took five years for Pirie to complete.

Michael O’Leary performs ‘Hey man, Wow!’, Tim Jones decodes ‘the mysteries of swing’ while Pirie himself writes of ‘the hush’, the ‘melancholy bat’, ‘cold stats’, ‘time stuck in the pavilion’ and ‘the legacies left behind’. His ‘Cricket Man’ opens, ‘At twilight see him there. / Miles from where he began / Miles from where he trained. / He’s playing the game he loves.’

Springtime, Sunday. At the book launch in the Long Room of the Basin Reserve, Don Neely takes the New Zealand Cricket tie off his neck and presents it to Mark Pirie, as if to say, ‘welcome to my team of players.’

  



Don Neely, Basin Reserve © Madeleine Marie Slavick



A Tingling Catch

A Century of New Zealand Cricket Poems, 1864-2009

Edited by Mark Pirie

Foreword by Don Neely

Wellington: HeadworX, 2010

ISBN 978-0-473-16872-8

189 pages

Thanks to Mark Pirie, cricket historian Don Neely, archivist Paddianne Neely and New Zealand Cricket Museum Curator David Mealing. Written by Madeleine Marie Slavick, an author based in Wellington.

Launch of A Tingling Catch at the Basin

A Tingling Catch: A Century of New Zealand Cricket Poems 1864-2009 was launched at the Basin Reserve Long Room on Sunday 31 October.

Michael O’Leary MC’d the event and introduced cricket historian, former national selector and former President of NZ Cricket Don Neely to launch the book. Don warmly commented on my task of selecting and compiling the book. He then finished in unscripted and dramatic fashion by removing his NZ Cricket tie (as President of NZ Cricket) and presenting me with it in appreciation of my work and as recognition of the book’s service to New Zealand cricket.

Here’s the text of his complete speech read on the day:

Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen and welcome to the Long Room at the Basin Reserve.

  Today, even though I am in my second home, I confess to feeling like a fish out of water. For three decades I have been used to addressing audiences about cricket and introducing famous international cricket people, players, commentators, writers, officials and leading politicians from the Government, the Wellington City Council and the Diplomatic Corp.

  Today I am delighted to launch Mark Pirie’s, ‘A Tingling Catch’, A Century of New Zealand Cricket Poems, 1864 – 2009, to an audience of people whose love of poetry is as great as my love of cricket.

  The famous English cricket commentator, writer and poet, John Arlott, once told me that there had been more books written on cricket than any other sport. This was 20 years ago and I have no reason to suspect that this fact is still true. Included are a number of anthologies of the poetry of cricket, all of them from England. To the best of my knowledge no other test country has compiled an anthology. Hence, 'A Tingling Catch’ becomes an important statistic in the history of New Zealand and world cricket.

  Some of my favourite English writers, Alan Ross, R.C. Robertson-Glasgow, Herbert Farjeon, Norman Gale and Alan Gibson, were also printed poets like Arlott. In common their writings on cricket display an incomparable blend of poetic imagination, shrewd judgement of character, verbal resource, and ready humour.

  My cricket acquaintances were firstly players.

  We have all grown-up reading Wisden and have over 150 books relating to cricket on our bookshelves. We talk, observe and think on a similar wavelength.

  ‘A Tingling Catch’ has taken me to a new view of cricket. Poetry is about ideas from a different perspective and I felt that I needed to have a discussion with the poet who wrote the verse.

  The language of the poems differed from my cricket vocabulary and I found this stimulating. Some of the poems jumped off the page and reminded me of some long-forgotten game or situation that I had encountered on the field.

  The cover captures the summer game being played on a much-loved venue. ‘A Tingling Catch’, takes me back to the first time that I caught a cricket ball and the sting in my hands conveyed a skill attained to match my older brother – a badge of maturity.

  Every variant of the game is captured from playing in the backyard or street, to school, club, first-class, test cricket, social cricket and pen-portraits. The historic, the self-deprecating, the tragic, the amusing, the sad – all have their rightful place in this most comprehensive anthology.

  Mark is to be congratulated on the thoroughness of his research. For 5 years he has raided newspapers, libraries, magazines and books in search of gems, to produce a richly, entertaining history of verse and song about cricket spanning 146 years. We can enjoy the book today -- and for the rest of our lives.

  Mark you never played cricket for New Zealand except in your dreams but rest assured that you have made a vital contribution to the history of cricket in New Zealand.

  It is with great pride that I declare ‘A Tingling Catch’, by Mark Pirie – launched.

  Don Neely

After Don spoke, I made a speech as editor of the book:

I’d like to say a few words at the launch of A Tingling Catch today.

  Firstly, I’d like to thank David Mealing for agreeing to keep the NZ Cricket Museum open for people to look around, the Long Room caterers, Scarlet Events, for organizing the drinks/refreshments, and Don and Paddianne Neely for all their help with the book over the past few months, and for recognizing the need for a book of this nature and contributing the Foreword when I first contacted them back in March 2009. Thanks too to Don for making the launch speech today and for the gift of the tie. It’s a moment I’ll always treasure. I’d also like to thank those who’ve helped with the book launch today and, of course, the contributors, (the superb cover artist Jocelyn Galsworthy) and the advisors to the book, some of whom are here and will read later.

  A Tingling Catch has been a labour of love for me over the past 4-5 years. It’s a book that I think is the best anthology I’ve prepared to date. As I’ve observed of anthologists, if they have a passion for a subject it usually brings out the best in them. This book combines two of my main loves: cricket and poetry.

  As well as this obvious interest driving me to put the book together, there was also an underlying belief that what I was doing was in some way a service to New Zealand cricket. I was never a great player myself though I’ve played a fair bit of Wellington club cricket over the years. So I thought maybe I could do something for New Zealand cricket by producing this book. I think there have only been three other anthologies of cricket poetry produced in the last 100 years, and neither of these focuses on a single country. It’s possible A Tingling Catch might even be the first nationally focused anthology of cricket poetry produced.

  When I began the book, most of the people I spoke to only knew of a handful of cricket poems written in New Zealand. I was delighted to find so much material. In the end there was more material found than I could use for the book. This is always a nice position for an editor to be in, and as a result I have started a blog for the book to post some of the poems that were left out as well as commentary and new poems recently found. It’s called “Tingling Catch” and is well worth seeking out. Hopefully poets I’ve missed will write to me and I can add their poems to the blog. It can be found by typing in the book’s title on Google. Already there have been over a thousand page views in the past few weeks, and news sites in India, Sri Lanka, the UK and America have picked it up.

  Now I’d like to read a poem of mine from the book ‘The Pavilion’ and then hand you over to the contributors who are most welcome to read a short poem from the book.

        Mark Pirie

A lively poetry reading followed the speeches. I played captain in a Lord’s cap and selected batting positions for each of the poets. As I had already read a poem in my speech I did not bat in this innings and as Niel Wright’s poem was 2 pages long he didn’t bat either. Here’s the batting order and team I made on the day and the poems they read:

Long Room Poets XI

1. Nicola Easthope           ‘How does your sun?’
2. David McGill                ‘Cricket Limerick’
3. Richard Langston          ‘A Game Not Played in Oklahoma’
4. Nelson Wattie              ‘Karori Park’
5. Tim Jones                     ‘Swing’
6. Michael O’Leary          ‘Hey man, Wow! [Jimi Hendrix]’
7. John Ansell (wk)           ‘Cricket Initials’
8. Harry Ricketts               ‘Kelburn Park’
9. Don Neely                    ‘What is Cricket?’
10. Niel Wright                   DID NOT BAT
11. Mark Pirie (captain)      DID NOT BAT

It was a fun innings, with each poet not afraid to play his or her shots.

Afterwards people went to the New Zealand Cricket Museum and explored in detail the history of the game.



Captain Mark Pirie sorts out his batting order



Tim Jones reading his poem 'Swing'

Cricketer Malcolm Murchie and MC Michael O'Leary



Nicola Easthope with Harry Ricketts and a friend

Long Room team mates David McGill and Niel Wright discuss tactics

Don Neely addresses the audience



Don Neely giving his NZ Cricket tie to Mark Pirie

   

NZ Cricket Museum Curator David Mealing with Mark Pirie

 

Richard Langston discusses A Tingling Catch

Richard Langston discussed A Tingling Catch with Jim Mora on Friday afternoon on Radio NZ National’s Afternoons (15/10/2010). Here’s the link to the downloadable audio version from The Panel, Part II: http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/afternoons/20101015
Here's a transcript of Richard's talk:

Richard Langston: There’s a new book out edited by Wellington poet Mark Pirie and he’s a cricket nut and he’s edited this wonderful collection of cricket poems: A Century of New Zealand Cricket Poems 1864-2009 and called it A Tingling Catch.

  It has some of the stuff you’d expect: Brian Turner and Harry Ricketts who are well known fans of cricket, but it also has other poets you might not expect to find in a cricket anthology such as Elizabeth Smither (from New Plymouth) who writes two excellent poems and also people who are kind of ‘outsider’ poets like Peter Olds in Dunedin and Geoff Cochrane in Wellington who also write about the game.

  So, it’s a really interesting collection. It’s not the sort of collection that celebrates great moments in sport. It celebrates all the peculiarities of cricket and people’s attitudes towards it and the oddities the game has thrown up and there’s lots of curiosities, including two poems that somebody [Graham Hutchins] found in a scorebook in Dunedin. I want to believe that’s true, that they were found in a scorebook in Dunedin because it’s such a lovely story and two interesting poems as well.

  The book has many sections in it: straighter stuff and parodies, a lot of humour. I’ve got two poems in the ‘Social Members’ section which is probably a good place for me to be, I was a pretty social cricketer, and my poem I’ll read is called ‘A Peculiar Game Not Played in Oklahoma’:

Once I tried to explain to a bunch

of Americans watching baseball

in a bar the game I loved to play

or watch in summer on a green field

with all the players in white was called

cricket and its highest expression

was played over five days and quite often

after many sessions of ebb and flow

of physical striving after five days

of  mind on mind quite often

there was no result nothing de nada

laughter rocked and tipped the barstools

I worked for three months in Oklahoma cooking burgers and I could never explain cricket to anyone without them falling about laughing, ‘You’re kidding me, man!’

Irene Gardiner: Nothing happens…

Richard Langston: But that’s the marvel of the game.

  Anyway, there’s better poems in the book. Honestly it’s a great read and it’s going to be launched at the end of the month, Sunday October 31, at the Basin Reserve Longroom and NZ Cricket Museum by Don Neely who is better known as a national selector but he has a poem in the book which is a take-off of Shakespeare, ‘To walk or not to walk…’

Jim Mora: That’s interesting, he was a good cricketer and a great cricket writer. What’s it called again?

Richard Langston: A Tingling Catch - and it’s put out by HeadworX, edited by Mark Pirie, and he’s got a blog devoted to the book already.

Jim Mora: Very good, Richard Langston on the Panel with Irene Gardiner.

Thanks, Richard. Richard, a TV3 Campbell Live reporter and poet, has two cricket poems in A Tingling Catch. One of them features a cricket streaker while the other poem is quoted above. Both display Langston’s distinct brand of droll humour. He’s also written another unpublished cricket poem. It’s worth sharing with you here:

RICHARD LANGSTON

In the Deep

Lesser cricketers in quiet stormy corners

of the country were stoic and patient.

‘Wait,’ they’d say expecting disaster.

They had a secret love of rain

of retiring to the damp musty smell

of the shed to stare at the state of their lives

or the want of them. The persistence of rain

sent them off to the pub to muse

of sunny days, of finally getting

on the board.

© Richard Langston, 2010

The poem’s as good an explanation as any I’ve seen of rained off cricket matches. If you’ve ever played club cricket in Wellington during November you are usually somewhere in the deep. You can well understand the frustration of turning up on Saturday to a washed out match and an early beer or shower in the clubrooms. Next Saturday you ‘muse’, you’ll get on the scoreboard. Of course, the poem works on more than one level.

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.