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.

Harry Ricketts’ NZ cricket triolets

Harry Ricketts is an academic, biographer, poet and editor who turned his hand to cricket writing when he published How to Catch a Cricket Match, a guide to getting the most out of day’s Test cricket. It’s in my list of favourite cricket books. He also edited an anthology of New Zealand sports writing, which I reviewed on this site.

In 2024, he followed up this one-off cricket publication with a very impressive book Richie Benaud’s Blue Suede Shoes, co-written with historian David Kynaston and published by Bloomsbury. It received the Cricket Writers’ Club Derek Hodgson Book of the Year. It gives Ricketts some international notice for his cricket writing.

Ricketts is a former Wellington club cricketer and a former schoolboy cricketer in England. At Wellington College, he broke the school record for wickets in a season. He has a life-long association with cricket through playing and now writing on the game.

He contributed several poems to A Tingling Catch and has continued to write on cricket since then. His Bob Woolmer poem was included on this blog, and he has also written triolets on cricket.

Triolets are still a relatively rare form of poetry dating back to the 13th century. Thomas Hardy and Wendy Cope are well known writers of the English triolet. Both Ricketts and I have tried the triolet in New Zealand cricket writing. My book Slips (2021) includes a number of triolets. Cricket poet George Francis Wilson once wrote ‘An Over of Triolets’; one for each ball bowled.

The triolet usually has a repetitive element to it, the opening two lines being repeated at the end. The novelty can wear thin after a while but it’s still a form that’s interesting to me. I was brave to put out a book of triolets Old Hat in 2012. Rather than just putting several triolets in a collection as Ricketts did with Half Dark and Bonfires on Ice.

Here are Ricketts’ two cricket triolets:

HARRY RICKETTS

Wellington, late summer 2014

On the bank at the Basin the crowd applauds;
cicadas click-click their castanets.
Listen to the money’s slow, withdrawing roar.
On the bank at the Basin the crowd applauds.
‘Wellington is a city that’s dying,’
says the man with cold snapper eyes.
On the bank at the Basin the crowd applauds;
cicadas click-click their castanets.

(From Half Dark, VUP, 2015)

Cricket

Man, I never hit it, straight off the pad;
That was absolutely plumb, would’ve knocked out middle.
Just for a moment we’re Hadlee or Brad-
man then, never hit it, straight off the pad.
Quite why a neat late cut should make us glad,
and sad a slow full pitch to leg, is a great riddle.
Man, I never hit it, straight off the pad;
That was absolutely plumb, would’ve knocked out middle.

(From Takahē 80, December 2013)

Poems © Harry Ricketts

Harry Ricketts’ cricket book Richie Benaud’s Blue Suede Shoes is available on Amazon. Here’s a link to the publisher’s website: Richie Benaud’s Blue Suede Shoes: The Story of an Ashes Classic: David Kynaston: Bloomsbury Publishing - Bloomsbury

Previous posts on Harry Ricketts:

Harry Ricketts’s cricket poem for Bob Woolmer

Summer Reads: The Awa Book of NZ Sports Writing

Mark Pirie’s triolets:

Tingling Catch congratulates the All Blacks

Mark Pirie’s Martin Guptill poem

Mark Pirie's new cricket poem Norwood Room

Harry Ricketts reviews Bert Sutcliffe biography

The latest issue of New Zealand Books (Autumn 2011) features a review of Richard Boock's The Last Everyday Hero: The Bert Sutcliffe Story (Longacre, 2010) by Harry Ricketts.
New Zealand Books (http://www.nzbooks.org.nz/) is a quarterly review journal that specialises in reviewing local books. It's good to see Boock's biography getting a substantial review there. One point of note. Harry says that Boock could've made more of the available material about Sutcliffe. For instance, Harry notes that John Arlott's piece on Bert Sutcliffe in Arlott's 100 Greatest Batsmen doesn't seem to have been referred to at all. Snippets from Arlott could've added to the book no doubt. Here's a quote from Arlott's piece on Sutcliffe: 'Like all the best batsmen, he was strong off the front foot or back - and his forward strokes were quite scholarly in method - his driving was handsome, but his hooking and pulling were equally effective.' I like the idea of Sutcliffe's strokes being 'scholarly in method'.
Other New Zealand batsmen in Arlott's 100 Greatest list (1989 ed.) are Martin Donnelly, Stewart Dempster, John Reid, Martin Crowe, Bevan Congdon and Glenn Turner.

See also my own blog review of Boock's biography (December 2010).

Harry Ricketts’ cricket poem for Bob Woolmer

Recently Harry Ricketts, the New Zealand poet, biographer, writer, editor and cricketer, sent me a poem to look at. The poem remembers his old First XI school mate and lover of cricket Bob Woolmer, the former South Africa and Pakistan coach and England all-rounder. Harry hadn’t intended the tribute to appear on the blog, but seeing as the 18th of March during this year’s World Cup marks the fourth anniversary since Bob Woolmer’s death, I thought it’d be a nice gesture to post Harry’s poem to share with others.

There is another New Zealand connection with Bob Woolmer worth mentioning. In Shane Bond’s recently released autobiography, he discusses the 2007 World Cup in the West Indies and the death of Bob Woolmer, his former county cricket coach at Warwickshire. In 2002, Bond replaced Shaun Pollock briefly during the county cricket season and was under the tutelage of Woolmer:

The biggest personality at the club…was Woolmer. His whole life had, one way or another, been tied up with cricket…his big goal was to set up an international cricket academy. He would tell me about the vision he had, how it would cost a lot of money, but it was his dream to create the greatest cricket facility the world has ever seen. He felt that he had enough knowledge to create the perfect set-up for guys to come from around the world and learn how to play the game from back to front.

His death at the 2007 World Cup was no surprise that he died doing what he loved, coaching. But his sudden loss was felt deeply by those of us who had enjoyed the pleasure of working with him. I’d seen him at the World Cup and stopped for a quick chat. He was always good for a natter – just a personable, relaxed guy, a deep thinker about the game.

                                                             (Shane Bond: Looking Back, p. 167)

The death of Woolmer was certainly the low point of the 2007 World Cup. I was in a bar in Wellington when I heard the news. Talk broke out in the bar about possible corruption and scandal behind Bob’s mysterious death. Could Bob have been murdered? Negative talk continued for days after, people suspecting the worst. Luckily, for cricket, the overseas pathologist’s reports indicated natural causes behind Woolmer’s death and conspiracy theories died away. However, a later Jamaican inquest jury gave an open verdict, so we may never know the full story. It is by all accounts a sad end to Woolmer who devoted his life to cricket. He was 58 when he died. I offer my heartfelt sympathy to Bob’s family and friends. An article by Ivo Tennant marking the four-year anniversary appeared in Cricinfo magazine. I understand that a trust set up in his memory will establish Woolmer’s cricket academy in South Africa.

Here’s Harry’s poem for Bob:

HARRY RICKETTS

Cricket coach Bob Woolmer, who died mysteriously in a Jamaica hotel room, coached which national side?

Here you are in today’s

five-minute quiz. Pakistan’s

the answer, but what about

South Africa? Which would

also be correct, wouldn’t it,

in the scorebook, plus at least

one other mysterious

death? Well, no more declarations,

no more referrals now.

Who’d have imagined all that

in summer 1961?

Captain of our First XI,

you weren’t popular, not

one of the lads like Danby

or Ussher, but you were kind to me.

At wogger on the playground,

we could never get you out

however fast we bowled.

You never gave a catch (one hand,

two bounces), never hit

our tennis balls over

the gym roof, never seemed

to get bored. Every innings

you were batting for your life.

Poem © Harry Ricketts 2011

Thanks Harry

(Sources: Email from Harry Ricketts; Cricinfo and Shane Bond: Looking Back with Dylan Cleaver (Hodder Moa, Auckland, 2010)

Article © Mark Pirie 2011

Waikato Times review of A Tingling Catch

The following review by Jeff Neems appeared in the Waikato Times, 14 January 2011, Leisure supplement, p. 15.

JEFF NEEMS

Verses for the Summer Game

Review of A Tingling Catch: A Century of New Zealand Cricket Poems 1864-2009, edited by Mark Pirie (HeadworX, RRP $34.99)

In the 17 years since I completed an English Literature degree at Waikato University, I’ve barely read a single poem.

  Three years of literary study and more than a decade of journalism largely burnt out my desire for recreational reading, except for the odd music book or quirky non-fiction work.

  Mark Pirie’s collection of New Zealand cricket poetry sat on my shelves for several weeks until, with the summer heating up and the cricket season under way, I gave it a closer look.

  What a terrific volume it is. It’s surprising, firstly, to discover just how much poetry has been written about the national summer game – as the title indicates, some of the verses included date back more than a century – and cricketing material traversed include everything from Lord’s (the London ground considered the home of the game) to songs sung by club cricketers, backyard cricket, and peculiar bat-and-ball moments few actually remember. Foreign tours, run-outs, first-ball ducks, famous players’ failures – all the vagaries of cricket are included.

  Admittedly a handful of poems have only the most tenuous connection to cricket, but it’s enough to see them included. A line here or there on the game makes them worthy in the compiler’s view.

  Some of the poems spread across several pages, with numerous complicated verse which at times can be slightly difficult to follow. These are generally the older poems, and some may require a second reading to gain full comprehension – although, thankfully, in many cases, the context of the poems is briefly detailed in helpful footnotes.

  Several of Michael O’Leary’s cricket-based poems are included, based on popular songs from the likes of The Doors and Bob Marley.

  I’m now into my late 30s, so it’s the material from the late 1970s onwards which was of most interest to me.

  Pirie’s own ‘The Record’ – just two verses – details Martin Crowe’s failure to complete a triple-century at the Basin Reserve in 1991 (he was caught behind on 299). There’s an excellent homage to veteran New Zealand all-rounder Chris Harris, ‘Ode to Harry’, from an anonymous author who demands Harris’s inclusion in the national team. There’s a similar feel to ‘A Tribute to RJ Hadlee’ by Ian Donnelly, which praises the great seam and swing bowler over eight four-line verses. The book's most poignant entry is just two lines long from Harry Ricketts – his ‘Epitaph for an old cricketer’.

It goes:

Death’s sharp offcutter

has bowled you through the gate.

Touching stuff, and the words I’d like inscribed on my headstone.

  If the crack of leather ball on willow bat soundtracks your summer, and you’ve a taste for well-chosen words, Pirie’s anthology will delight you, and while away many hours between deliveries.

Jeff Neems is a Waikato Times feature writer and club cricketer.

Review © Jeff Neems 2011

Summer Reads: The Awa Book of NZ Sports Writing

Review by Mark Pirie of The Awa Book of New Zealand Sports Writing edited by Harry Ricketts, Awa Press, RRP $40.00.

Harry Ricketts released his book of New Zealand sports writing in June this year. I went along to the launch at Unity Books, Wellington. It was a full house. Writer and columnist Steve Braunias launched the book. I used to enjoy Steve’s football pieces when he was writing for the New Zealand Listener. At the launch, he told a story about his meeting with football writer Brian Glanville.

So, what will you get if you buy The Awa Book of New Zealand Sports Writing? Well, what you get is a carefully selected and highly personal compendium of national sports writing. It has an excellent introduction written by Harry himself. This book is the first of its kind since Lloyd Jones’ Into the Field of Play. Personal taste is definitely a hallmark of Harry’s selection. Harry is keen to capture odd as well as famous moments in New Zealand sport that convey a sense of literary craft as well as being memorable. Wit, humour and poignancy seem important. He has lifted various pieces from New Zealand sports books, newspapers, blogs, anthologies and biographies.
The oldest piece here is about canoe racing from The Nelson Examiner, 1843. Jeremy Coney’s snippet (from his autobiography The Playing Mantis) features Coney breaking his arm in the 1980s against the Windies - Joel Garner was the bowler. Brian Turner writes a poem for his brother during Glenn Turner’s difficult season in 1975/1976 (also included in A Tingling Catch). Other cricketing quirks are Hamish McDouall’s injury list for Chris Cairns used by Harry as a found poem.

Rugby and cricket are the most prominent. T.P. McLean, Keith Quinn, Chris Laidlaw, Greg McGee, Lloyd Jones and Spiro Zavos form the backline on rugby matches. Martin Crowe observes New Zealand’s semi-final cricket loss to Pakistan in the 1992 World Cup, and there are pieces by Joseph Romanos on New Zealand’s lowest Test innings total of 26, Lynn McConnell on New Zealand’s first Test victory in 1956 and Dick Brittenden on Bert Sutcliffe and Bob Blair during the Second Test against South Africa, 1953/54 season. Other sports featured are netball, racing, bowling, running, canoeing, swimming, mountaineering, fishing, yachting, boating, boxing, golf, aviation, archery, tennis, cycling, and soccer. Unfortunately, there is nothing here about rugby league or rowing. As Harry says, he ‘couldn’t find anything that was particularly memorable’.

Some of the best pieces in the book are by people one wouldn’t identify with a particular sport. Literary writers with much smaller audiences feature alongside big name sports writers and columnists from major dailies. Bill Sewell writes on Richard Pearse. Poet James Brown takes us to a child’s netball practice. You can sense the craftsmanship, with carefully chosen lines like: ‘Practice drizzles to a close’. Alongside conventional sports writing, poetry receives a fair amount of space. Bill Manhire has two racing poems, one very good poem on Phar Lap. Bub Bridger has a comic poem about wanting the Whetton brothers for Christmas. Pity the poem wasn’t better to really immortalise the Whetton brothers. Harry might’ve been better to have included one of his own cricket pieces in its place.

Overall, the great thing about this book is you can take it with you to sporting matches or on the airplane travelling. It’s the kind of book that’s perfectly designed for dipping into during the lunch breaks at Test matches or reading and storing at your summer bach. Not all the writing here is that memorable to me but I really like Harry's idea of a New Zealand book of sports writing as well as the range of sports on offer. Another editor might've picked an entirely different team, e.g. the cricket writing of Don Neely and Sir Richard Hadlee for instance. As Harry points out, 'You could probably assemble three or four parallel anthologies to this one without serious duplication’. Questions of personal taste aside, it’s nice to have a book like this to read, enjoy and return to in our leisure.

Review © Mark Pirie 2010

The Awa Book of NZ Sports Writing
edited by Harry Ricketts
(Awa Press: 2010)

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)

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.

Poetic Licence – Nicola Easthope’s cricket poem

Rob Hack’s poetry column, Poetic Licence, in Paekakariki Xpressed newspaper, featured the following poem from A Tingling Catch by Nicola Easthope. The poem is notable for its mention of current cricket hero and New Zealand captain Dan Vettori. The stanza on Vettori first appeared in Harry Ricketts’ How to Catch a Cricket Match published by Awa Press:

NICOLA EASTHOPE

How does your sun?

In Alison Holst’s sunset

the sea creams like butter

wind serrates the shallows

on the earth’s warm crust

For Daniel Vettori, the sun

dips over a shimmering pitch

knocks out distant island stumps

spins on towards the clouds

As the sun sets for Mel Gibson

Berocca slips into blue tequila

fizzes like a wave retreating

the night devoid of stars

My sun is a broken speed limit

cycling down Paekakariki Hill

a red disc burning up the town

plunging into the rapturous sea

Poem © Nicola Easthope

(from Paekakariki Xpressed, Friday September 17, 2010, p. 14)

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.