New Zealand Writers
TURNER, Brian
dismiss all talk of "rare beauty" / or "lyric fastness" as piffle There are / always the hills
Author entry from The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature, edited by Roger Robinson and Nelson Wattie (1998). About the Companion entries View list of Companion contributors
TURNER, Brian (1944 ), is an unrepentantly regional Otago poet whose work moves constantly beyond the merely local or descriptive. Wider recognition has come with the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for his first collection, Ladders of Rain (1978) and the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry for Beyond (1992).
His other collections are Ancestors (1981), Listening to the River (1983), Bones (1985) and All That Blue Can Be (1989). He has also written short fiction and plays, his cricket play, Fingers Up? winning the J.C. Reid Memorial Prize 1985. In poetry and prose, Turner is one of New Zealand's most significant writers on *landscape, environmentalism and sport, through regular journalism for National Business Review, the Independent and elsewhere, and books including Images of Coastal Otago (1982), New Zealand High Country: Four Seasons (1983), The Last River's Song (1989) all text accompanying photographs The Visitor's Guide to Fiordland, New Zealand (1983), Timeless Land (with Owen *Marshall and Graham Sydney, 1992) and his cricketing brother's biography, Opening Up (with Glenn Turner, 1987).
His work is represented in all recent major poetry anthologies and in literary sports anthologies such as Into the Field of Play (ed. Lloyd *Jones, 1992), the Picador Book of Golf (1995) and New Zealand's Treasury of Trout and Salmon (ed. Bryce Hammond and John Parsons).
Turner has eschewed poetic cliques and fashions as rigorously as he rejects the archaic conventions of nature poetry: 'dismiss all talk of "rare beauty" / or "lyric fastness" as piffle There are / always the hills (Always the hills).
His imaginative effort is always to establish that emphasised 'are', to cut away all intrusive pretension or platitude and render directly and with respect the independent reality of the things that matter to him: 'Only the mountains know / where they have come from / and where they are going / and what will happen when we are gone'.
Very often these are the hills, winds, clouds and rivers of the back-country landscape which he knows more actually and actively than probably any previous New Zealand poet. (Only the high-country writers like John *Pascoe or Philip *Temple can match him.) His 'nature poetry' is thus of that best kind which works as directly as the sun and the rain, and is a fusion of the poet's roots, experience and reading.
Or often his subjects are more domestic, though still always vivid with the elemental processes of life. His 'Carrot' is told 'I understand / your angry new-born look / when you are wrenched / from the earth's warm haven; a slaughtered pig becomes, by its sheer dead weight, an emblem of grief for mortality ('Pig'); and, refreshingly egalitarian, he writes poems for grass, pebbles, potatoes ('scabby testicles'), autumn blackberries, fingerbones, a craven pet dog or a sleeping cat 'digesting the heart of a bird'.
And he writes with the same tough honesty about human emotions, relationships and (increasingly) memories, all subject to the same elemental processes of growth and decay as if they were trees or grass, all affirming the vital worth of emotion while almost passionately resisting sentimentalism.
So there are many fine love poems, poems of loss or grief, about happiness or the unseen bond with ancestors or the changing relationship with his father, poems where a creature may become the emblem for a complex of human feeling ('To muse is to escape / which a free-ranging chicken / can't do. There's a squawk / and a chaos of feathers / disappears into straw-coloured grasses —'Bantam', uncollected).
Quite often Turner adopts a droll bloke role, brushing off anything phoney or pretentious with a quirkily derogatory wit, whether about a hawk ('the smarmy Al Capone / of the air'), or a love tryst interrupted by 'a fat frog / croaking and staring pop-eyed / like a lovesick money-lender', or a moment of wickedly deprecating self-consciousness: 'I shrug off my shirt. / Burly men do it better, I'm sure / but shrugging is manly / so I shrug away and cough.'
Beneath the wit, the no-nonsense honesty, the rigorous clarity of sense and the sinewy rhythmic energy of the poems' surfaces runs the craft of a sophisticated, confident and well-read poet echoes of Berryman, Merwin, Durcan, *Baxter, complex sound structures and a fine vibrant lyricism, the more singing because anchored so naturally in observed reality and the effort to make real.
Turner has worked, among other things, as customs officer, rabbiter, sawmiller, editor for *Oxford University Press and managing editor of *John McIndoe. He has been a national-class hockey player, senior cricketer and mountaineer, and is still a skilled race cyclist, fisherman and yachtsman. He held the *Burns Fellowship in 1984 and the University of Canterbury writing fellowship in 1997. He was born in Dunedin, educated at Otago BHS and lives in Oturehua, in the Ida Valley, Central Otago.
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Updated Information
Turner co-wrote Lifting the Covers (1997) with his brother and former New Zealand representative cricketer Glenn Turner.On the Loose (1998) is his authorised biography of rugby star Josh Kronfeld. In 2002, he published a biography of the All Black legend, Meads.
Turner's essays include one for the prize-winning book of paintings The Art of Grahame Sydney (2001), and a long introductory piece on New Zealanders' increasingly tenuous relationships with nature for Scott Freeman's New Zealand Photographs (2001).
Brian Turner's latest book Taking Off (2001) is his first in almost 10 years and was shortlisted in the 2002 Montana New Zealand Book Awards The poems are of separation, the relationship with his ageing father, departed friends and of living life in Central Otago.
Somebodies and Nobodies (2002) is the story of Brian Turner- as well as the story of the unusually talented, sports-mad family to which he belongs.
Brian Turner was appointed as the fourth Te Mata Estate New Zealand Poet Laureate in 2003.
Somebodies and Nobodies (2002) has been longlisted for the Montana Medal for Non Fiction Biography Category in the Montana New Zealand Book Awards 2003.
The fruits of Brian Turner's two-year tenure as the Te Mata Estate Poet Laureate were published in Footfall (Random House, 2005). He writes frankly and perceptively of the delicate relationships between people, and his work evokes the nature and depth of the attachment of people to places. It was nominated in the 2006 shortlist for the Montana New Zealand Book Awards.
He recently completed Meads, the biography of rugby legend, Colin Meads (Hodder Moa Beckett, 2006). His poem, 'The Great Where are We' appeared The Six Pack, the sampler of New Zealand writing from New Zealand's inaugral Book Month publication (2006).
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