A blog site for the anthology, A Tingling Catch: A Century of New Zealand Cricket Poems 1864-2009 edited by Mark Pirie; foreword by Don Neely (HeadworX Publishers, Wellington, New Zealand, 2010). The blog features reviews and commentary on the book as well as New Zealand cricket poetry, reviews of New Zealand cricket books and other related material. The book's cover is by UK cricket painter Jocelyn Galsworthy.
Last year, Nick Whittock sent me a copy of his latest cricket poetry book called The Doon, an exchange for a copy of Michael O’Leary’s Out of It that I published. It’s taken me a while to get on to it, but here’s a brief review of the book.
Review of The Doon by Nick Whittock (Vagabond Press, Australia, 2012)
Whittock is the author of the superb Covers, a collection of his very imaginative cricket poetry, one of my favourite cricket books. I’ve interviewed him previously for this blog on Covers.
The Doon, beautifully produced with Kay Orchison cover design/b/w artwork, is his follow up to Covers. It is a saddle-stapled chapbook by Vagabond Press in Sydney, Australia. It is a limited edition, a rare cricket and poetry book. My copy is No. 28 of 100 copies.
The cover sports an old, antique cricket bat, and ‘Doon’ in the title is presumably a play on ‘Don’ as in Don Bradman.
Bradman or his myth features in several of the poems here.
There are seven poems in total, including the poem ‘Don Bradman’. I first included that piece in A Tingling Catch in 2010. It is a monologue by a cricket spectator and recommends Ross Taylor as a ‘good fucking batsman’. As a Kiwi, I agree. It goes on to make comments about Twenty 20:
problem with 2020s not that it
dumbsdown cricket or its techniques
(in fact it enhances them all)
but the dumbing down of commentary…
Whittock’s technique is cut-up and Modernist, an element of Dada art involved. This can make the poems not as accessible as some other cricket poetry out there. The poetry texts require several readings to elucidate their ‘meanings’ and the jokes about beer are fair dinkum Australian, from the Rodney Marsh to David Boon era of the ’70s/’80s.
Throughout, the poems examine a contemporary Australian Bradman/Beeradman cultural myth effectively.
‘clara 81’ from Whittock’s Clara series (alluding to Brian Lara/Michael Clarke/Lara Bingle) reads like an elegy for former Australian captain Kim Hughes as ‘the people he could never be’. My favourite is ‘0s’ a poem about noughts in the scoresheet, published in the Sun Herald in Sydney in 2009. It ends by alluding to David Bowie’s ‘Heroes’: ‘blobs just for one day’.
The book concludes with the long, rambling ‘shane watson: becoming opening’ about Watto’s adventures as an opener. The poem conjures pithy one-liners, puns and word-play and fine imagery of a match v Pakistan (Yousuf, Akmal & Co). With plenty of clever allusions to Ricky Ponting, Stuart Law and Michael Clarke in the second section, it is rewarding.
I’ll end with the funniest poem here from a Kiwi perspective called ‘don bradmans wildly successful tour of nz’, a touring/holiday incident about camping in the Bay of Islands:
Anyone interested in the real Don Bradman’s 1932 visit to New Zealand, a similarly unrewarding spectacle, can read my blog article on it. Thanks to Nick for letting me reproduce the poem.
About Vagabond Press:“Independent Literary Press since 1999. Based in Sydney and Tokyo, Vagabond Press is dedicated to promoting new writing in Asia Pacific. Over our first ten years we published many of the key emerging voices in Australian poetry. Over the next ten years we aim to publish and promote new prose, poetry and criticism from Asia Pacific.”
Nick Whittock is a Melbourne poet and cricketer. He plays for the Reds Cricket Club in Melbourne which has a colourful history to tell. See their web page at http://reds.cricketvictoria.com.au/redsorigins.html
I first came across Nick's work in 2008 through a mutual friend Paul Hardacre, an Australian poet and publisher with papertigermedia. Paul said he knew a guy who wrote lots of cricket poems and had done a book of them. I said, cool, tell me how to get in touch with him. I contacted Nick and got him to exchange cricket poetry books. I sent him my book Slips and he posted me his book covers (2004).
covers quickly became one of my favourite cricket books. I bought extra copies and sent them out to friends. It’s an unusual design, visually attractive, lots of photos of cricketers in fielding positions or lazing round on the field at various moments during a game, and the poems are mysterious and repay further reading. Written in contemporary style and idiom, they cover a wide ground: Australian opener Michael Slater’s thoughts when batting right through to a concrete poem on Jason Gillespie (see below) and an extended longer poem on Muralitharan’s unusual bowling action.
Later I contacted him again to use two of his poems for A Tingling Catch.
In the 2008/09 and 2009/10 seasons Nick toured the North and South Islands of New Zealand with the Reds Cricket Club. On each tour he played about 9 games against local club teams.
Last month I told Nick I was doing a blog and he sent me some of his new cricket poems and I asked to do an interview with him as well. Here’s the interview followed by a new series of Nick’s cricket poems.
Mark: When did you first start writing cricket poetry?
Nick: I moved to Melbourne in 2000. That was when it started. Yeah definitely. I'd written a fragment – something kinda sci-fi with astronauts n radars. It was rad but tiny and had no future. Until some cricket words replaced a number of key terms and everything fell into place and the fragment was suddenly 'about' something (it prophesied – accurately - Brian Lara's return to form in that summer's test series).
Mark: How do you compose your poems? Do you take a notebook to matches and Tests and compose during the match or do you mainly do your writing at home after the match has finished?
Nick: Yeah definitely. Variously. Sometimes I'll transcribe lines from the commentary or the ads during the coverage. If I'm watching a game live I barely write anything down – my involvement is far to concentrated. But I certainly gather concepts, visions and ideas. Form is very important in the construction of a poem. If I write cricket poetry it's less to do with subject matter than form. The forms of cricket and the syntax that organises them often underlies my poems. The most obvious example of this is a lot of scorecard poetry I've been building where the words / lines align on a scorecard and are distributed according to the scorecards' frames and the very particular flows of reading involved in reading a scorecard.
Mark: In 2004 you published a cricket poetry book called "covers". What kind of reception did you get from the poetry community and cricket fraternity? I gave a few copies of it to cricket poets in New Zealand and it went down well with them. Tell us about the book and how it came together, i.e. the interesting use of cricket images mixed in with the poems?
Nick: Yeah definitely. Covers was published through an imprint that the great online journal cordite had going for a little while – the imprint was called COD (Cordite on Demand). Davey Prater (cordite's editor) asked me if I'd like to do a book with them. Obviously I jumped at it. Davey was very active in encouraging me to construct something that wasn't just a book of poetry but an artefact of some beauty. I love those old cricket books full of old grainy black and white photographs of beings (cricketers) in weird distorted stances. I sifted through some books I had at hand and extracted images of cricketers on the ground, looking as though they were asleep or in various states of recent awakening. It's an obvious thing but I love how soporific cricket is – I think it’s often criticised for being boring. It’s possible these critics don't get just how intensely interestingly boring it is – the sleepiness, the way time passes, the dreaming that goes on. The pictures were some sort of reflection on this. And they allowed the creation of a different sort of flow (series of resonance) than just page and text would have. People I know who have read or seen covers tell me they like the way it looks n largely profess to being mystified by the content. Beyond that I don't really think it was ever 'received' – yet?
Mark: You play cricket yourself. Do you think being a cricketer is essential to writing cricket poetry and understanding the finer points of the game or can anyone write cricket poetry?
Nick: Yeah anyone can. I guess they just would be less likely too. Someone who doesn't play cricket would have a completely different understanding of the game – the finer points would be differently fine. I wonder if they would understand the constant failure a cricketer has to deal with.
This is important as it leads to the special emotional value that success at cricket holds – how momentous cricket’s events are and what it means to a cricketer when they manage to get things going their way. The profundity of cricket’s events might be lost on a non-cricketer, but they could always garner profundity from different sources and through observing other aspects of the rigmarole.
Mark: You run a blog "Ashes/Urn", has this encouraged interest in your cricket poetry. Or is it mainly a way for you to blog on cricket matches and events?
Nick: Yeah definitely. It gets me writing and the ideas that come up there and a lot of the lines too can end up in or informing poems. Posts about Michael Clarke get a lot of hits. I wonder what they make of it though. Yeah definitely it's handy to have the presence to refer people to when they express an interest. As much as blogging on matches it’s a way to invent or distort concepts and philosophies. I find it very free and experimental. It’s rigorously anti-rigour, but without being stupid or stupidly light.
Mark: Tell me about your new Clara poems and how they came about?
Nick: Michael Farrell [an Australian poet] suggested the scope of my project (poetry solely about cricket) was too broad and that I should try only writing poetry about Michael Clarke. So I did. At that time Clarke came with Lara Bingle, a combo that immediately adds a third element - Brian Lara. So when I was writing about Clarke I was also writing about Lara, and Lara was either Lara or Lara or, actually, Lara was always both Lara and Lara. Given the resonance across all these names I began to feel that the distinction between Clarke and Lara was a bit arbitrary so I took Clar and Lara and made Clara. Brian Lara's middle name is Charles so you see his name written like this B. C. Lara. So Clara became this monstrous amalgamation of forms and started sweeping up the entire cricketing world. It became some kind of motivating force – a figure of pure desire or something. When Clarke and Lara split I took that view that it was a split as in the way a cell multiplies by dividing. Clara proliferated.
Nick Whittock's poem 'Dizzy Gillespie' about former
Australian bowler Jason Gillespie, who once scored a Test double century
at No. 9 against Bangladesh batting as the night watchman.
I also found one arresting site in England. It’s the web site of the English poet Arthur Salway, described as “the website of cricket verse. The poet Arthur Salway shares his insight on the game…” The link is: http://www.cricketpoetry.com/
The author’s bio states: “Arthur is a retired mathematics teacher living in Hampshire, England. Now aged 71, he played his last mildly competitive match, unknowingly of course, aged 68. He remembers watching Gloucestershire at Bristol as a boy and admiring the strokeplay of Walter Hammond, Charlie Barnett, George Emmett, and the emerging Tom Graveney.”
Arthur also makes a note about his reasons for writing cricket poetry:
[Arthur] sees cricket as an instance of the whole exceeding the sum of the parts and his poems seek to exploit the area of difference. They are essentially for cricketers, drawing on a knowledge of the game, its devotees, participants, and ethos.
Many of the poems were written for team evenings and are presented for your reading due to the insistence of his erstwhile team-mates. Arthur very much hopes that you will enjoy some, if not all, of them.
The website primarily contains Arthur’s cricket poetry, neat action pics of cricket matches as well as videos and games. Arthur writes well. His tools are rhyme and rhythm and he explores various facets of the game, sometimes in great depth. There is a detailed description of a team kit bag:
Our bag is green & made of canvas, strong and leather bound,
Overfilled with kit we’ve purchased, borrowed, begged or found;
Emptied out on summer evenings when it doesn’t rain,
But frankly half the stuff it holds we’ll never use again-
Worn out gloves with pimply rubber stitched up to the knuckles,
Floppy pads with leather straps & little jingly buckles,
All marked ‘BrookfieldSchool’ in pen in prominent positions,
And some with names of other clubs, nicked from the opposition.
Arthur’s poetry is illuminating and witty, with a wide range of poems offered. There are poems on bowling, batting, the scorebook, the cricketer’s appearance, the pavilion, the cricket field, golden moments, and reflections on the game of cricket. Here’s a favourite stanza of mine from ‘The Flick of the Wrist’:
Soccer is won with cultured feet
And rugger with grit and grist;
But when cricket is played the difference is made
By a delicate turn of the wrist.
Like David Fine's "Ashes Poetry", Salway's "Cricket Poetry" is well worth checking out.
