A Tingling Catch contributor's memorial service

On Friday I spoke at the memorial service for Harvey McQueen, a contributor and advisor to A Tingling Catch.
Here's a link to the eulogy I read that I posted on my personal website:
http://www.markpirie.com/blog/2011/1/28/eulogy-for-harvey-mcqueen-by-mark-pirie
See also my related blog posts: 'A Tingling Catch contributor Harvey McQueen dies' and 'Harvey McQueen's These I Have Loved'.

A Tingling Catch contributor Harvey McQueen dies

My friend, the well-known poet/educationalist/anthologist Harvey McQueen, a contributor and adviser to A Tingling Catch and a HeadworX author, sadly passed away on 25 December 2010. I’d like to offer my condolences to his partner Anne Else as well as his family and friends.
I attended a small private service for him at the Main Chapel, Karori Crematorium on Friday 31 December 2010. A public memorial service was held on Friday 28 January 2011 at Old St Paul's, Mulgrave Street, Wellington. Ian Wedde, myself, Vincent O'Sullivan and Roger Robinson spoke on Harvey's literary career at the service.
In lieu of flowers, you are invited to make a donation to the Harvey McQueen Memorial Fund, to foster children's appreciation of New Zealand's birds through Zealandia. Donations may be posted to Zealandia, PO Box 9267, Marion Square, Wellington 6141.

Harvey wrote a blog "Stoat Spring" and was an active member of the New Zealand literary blog community. All who’ve followed his blog over the past few years will feel the loss of his presence. Harvey was also the co-editor with Ian Wedde of The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse, the memoirs The Ninth Floor and This Piece of Earth, and seven poetry collections, including Goya Rules (HeadworX, 2010). I interviewed and featured Harvey in my poetry journal, broadsheet, issue no. 5, May 2010.

I’d like to post Harvey’s poem from A Tingling Catch in memory of him.

HARVEY McQUEEN

From Akaroa DHS  

i First Day

In winning their war, all my adults counselled certitude
though perilous the outcome from those massive field guns
until strung up to view was a mistress & her Mussolini.

My stepfather, who’d slogged from Cairo to Trieste,
swore fluent & rolled his own as only a soldier could & should
& his wife, my mother,
anxiously signed me up for the third form.

Being small –

thirty-five the roll –
‘your son won’t come to any harm’
& ‘Sticky’ Arnold strolled out to the clustered strangers
suggesting they leave untouched this uncounted one.

Despite my plea(s)
they gave me the neglect of a horse trough dribble
the other new boys received a headfirst dunking
in front of the admiring girls.

Inside – at a test, unthinking, I got them all right.
Someone said ‘skite’
& for revenge
at lunchtime caught & bowled me spin first ball
whereupon I went out to field cicadas on the boundary.

Poem © Harvey McQueen

Harvey McQueen
(HeadworX publicity photo)

See my blog post from October last year, ‘Harvey McQueen’s These I Have Loved’, on Harvey’s last poetry anthology, These I Have Loved: My Favourite New Zealand Poems, published by Steele Roberts.



These I Have Loved:
My Favourite New Zealand Poems
edited by Harvey McQueen
(Steele Roberts, 2010)

Harvey McQueen’s These I Have Loved

When I began this blog, I thought I would restrict my comments to cricket poetry and related material. On Sunday I went to a launch for Harvey McQueen’s new poetry anthology These I Have Loved. No cricket in it - but it’s worth mentioning. Harvey is a contributor to A Tingling Catch. He helped with early versions of the book, and he encouraged me to be more judicious in my final selection. One afternoon, after talking with him, I cut the book quite substantially.

I note Harvey’s book took him 10 years from its original conception and five years of actual work on the book. His anthology has been through a number of drafts. I saw an early version where I had two poems included - now just one. So it's nice to still be in it.

Harvey’s anthology is unique. He has put together his favourite ‘100 New Zealand poems’. Not many would take up this challenge. These I Have Loved is an innovative masterpiece in 21 section breaks, like a long powerful poetic sequence, orchestral and symphonic. Love in a spiritual and secular sense (and in its changing states and forms) is at the forefront throughout. Harvey treats poets with great respect, from our colonial elders (Michael Keane, Dora Wilcox, Will Lawson, Frank Morton), to classic poets like Glover, Campbell, Curnow, Baxter, Fairburn, Johnson, Frame, Bethell, to more recent younger poets like Amy Brown, Kate Camp and myself. He provides valuable notes about why certain poems have affected him throughout his life. The book is a rare treat with excellent production work by publisher Steele Roberts. The book is what it is, a personal selection of New Zealand poetry that has affected Harvey. Helen Shaw’s Mystical Choice anthology and her other anthology work might be another example of an anthologist covering similar wide ground to Harvey.

Back to the cricket: in the original manuscript of A Tingling Catch, Harvey had two poems. I took one out. I felt there were too many poems mentioning Hadlee in a similar fashion, but I’d like to share the poem with you. The poem is from Harvey’s sequence Room (Black Robin, 1988) about his former house at Farm Road, Northland,Wellington. It gives a good sense of cricket watching, how it is often on in the background, while daily lives and thoughts (political and historical) continue around it:

HARVEY MCQUEEN

From Room

iv

Good intentions lost in watching TV,

soup upon our knees as Hadlee bowls.

Every space has its own rituals,

trampolines from which we spring to other spheres;

the place of eating in religion is well recognised,

grace & candles,

                           the terrain of sex & sensibility.

Pottery bowls of ripe fruit,

confessions of forgetfulness,

Nigro’s faceless male,

Palmer’s self-sufficiency of women,

at some point the picture becomes background.

Strange the shrines we erect,

Semple preaching for conscription,

yesterday’s rebel now leads the parade,

loyalties, oracles, infidelities

the effort we invest in them,

during the advertisements I open yet another red.

Poem © Harvey McQueen

Thanks Harvey for your new anthology, and for all the work you have done for poets and poetry.

These I Have Loved: My favourite New Zealand poems (published by Steele Roberts).
Enquiries to info@steeleroberts.co.nz

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.