TURNER, Brian (Lindsay)

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Nationality: New Zealander. Born: Dunedin in 1944. Education: Otago Boys' High School, 1957–61. Family: Divorced; one son. Career: Customs officer, Customs Department, Dunedin, 1962–64, and Christchurch, 1964–66; trade and university sales representative, and editor, Oxford University Press, Wellington, 1968–74; radio journalist, Radio Otago, Dunedin, 1974; managing editor, John McIndoe Ltd., Dunedin, 1975–83, 1985–86. Awards: Commonwealth poetry prize, 1978; Robert Burns fellowship (University of Otago), 1984; John Cowie Reid Memorial prize, 1985; New Zealand Book award for poetry, 1993; Scholarship in Letters, 1994. Address: 410 Highgate Roslyn, Dunedin, New Zealand.

Publications

Poetry

Ladders of Rain. Dunedin, McIndoe, 1978.

Ancestors. Dunedin, McIndoe, 1981.

Listening to the River. Dunedin, McIndoe, 1983.

Bones. Dunedin, McIndoe, 1985.

All That Blue Can Be. Dunedin, McIndoe, 1989.

Beyond. Dunedin, McIndoe, 1992.

Other

Images of Coastal Otago, photographs by Michael de Hamel. Dunedin, McIndoe, 1982.

New Zealand High Country: Four Seasons, photographs by Gordon Roberts. Wellington, Millwood Press, 1983.

Opening Up, with Glenn Turner. Auckland, Hodder and Stoughton, 1987.

The Last River's Song, photographs by Lloyd Godman. Dunedin, McIndoe, 1989.

The Guide to Trout Fishing in Otago. Dunedin, Otago Acclimatisation Society, 1994.

The Australian Terrace House. Melbourne, Angus and Robertson, 1995.

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Critical Study: By Lawrence Dale, in Landfall, 44(3), September 1990.

Brian Turner comments:

People and places, past and present—the way they color one's life and the color they give to our existence—are constant themes in my poetry. My poetry has been described, variously, as "taut," "spare," "frank," "traditional," "regional," and my voice as "strongly individual" and "highly distinctive." In essence I am a lyric poet.

Vincent O'Sullivan has written that "reading [my] poems is to enter a world where natural things stand starkly, and emotions are felt as directly as the rocks and streams and mountains to which constantly he returns. It is difficult to think of any New Zealand writer who is so at ease with them … His lines are precise, honest, warm, undogmatic."

I am interested in the inner responses of people to the natural world around them and in their responses to each other. My work contains a significant number of love poems.

Somewhere I have been termed "the quintessential Otago poet of his day"—a flattering, resonant description that makes me chortle.

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Brian Turner is known principally as a regional poet, an observer of the often rugged terrain and wildlife of Otago, the province of New Zealand's South Island that is his home. He has gained a much wider reputation for the directness, honesty, and vividness of work that habitually puts human matters into natural and challenging contact with a deeply known land.

Turner has poems on hawks that recall Hughes, on landscape that recall Heaney. But his eye and voice are distinctly his own in their strength and sensitivity to their own habitation and in their quirkily derogatory wit. In Turner's "Hawk" the bird

is prying Director,
is the smarmy Al Capone
of the air; the shushing wing-beat
harbours the sound
of cruising limousines...

In "Carrot" he says to the vegetable,

You know, carrot,
you grate on my nerves.
 
I understand
your angry new-born look
when you are wrenched
from the earth's warm haven.

His moon is "buxom" and his mountains "white-rumped," his clouds "hump in full view," and his bumblebee is a "goofy flyer."

While such a list omits Turner's clarity and sensitivity of description, it demonstrates how emphatically he rejects mannered pastoralism. Refreshingly egalitarian too, he writes poems for grass, pebbles, radishes, potatoes ("scabby testicles"), a craven pet dog, a sleeping cat, a slaughtered pig, and even a runner struggling uphill in training. He mocks the conventional platitudes and deprecates the more conventional subjects. "Dismiss all talk of 'rare beauty' /or 'lyric fastness' as piffle," he writes, insisting simply that "there are always the hills" ("Always the Hills" from Ladders of Rain).

Turner deprecates himself too, as "Nature Man," as fantasist ("I might have been like Wyatt Earp"), and as lover. In "Take It As It Comes," a very funny poem of an amorous encounter, an interior monologue wickedly mocks male self-consciousness at such moments:

I shrug off my shirt.
Burly men do it better, I'm sure,
but shrugging is manly
so I shrug away and cough...

In "Country Matters" distraction at the key moment comes from

	a fat frog
		croaking and staring pop-eyed
like a lovesick money-lender...

In this good-humored self-mockery, pragmatism, and refusal to sentimentalize, Turner could be called (were it not nearly defamatory to do so in New Zealand these days) an unrepentantly masculine poet. There is a male quality in his honesty, generosity, delicacy of feeling, loyalty, and capacity for self-criticism, as well as in his wit, bawdiness, and energy. He is also a love poet whose forthrightness, tenderness, and insight are without equal among contemporary New Zealand writers of either gender. The following is from "Love Poem":

Fretful I melt in the sensate
and lovely river of your body
and you leave me desolate,
afraid...

Turner also has written outstanding poems of personal relations, including poems for his father (movingly charting a changing relationship), for children, for past lovers, for friends, and, perhaps most memorably, for ancestors. The continuity of human and family contact with the land has become one of his central themes, notably in Ancestors and Bones, while Beyond has added the complexities of time and memory.

Such lack of concern for convention, along with his almost defiant regionalism, could make Turner seem a provincial primitivist, a sort of down under John Clare, if it were not for the high sophistication of his reading and his craft. Williams, Berryman, Lowell, Ashbery, Gass, Raymond Chandler, Larkin, James K. Baxter, and Paul Durkin, among others, are studied and incorporated as naturally and directly as the rivers, hills, and vegetables that are the other sort of soil for Turner's poetic roots. He shows himself increasingly able to write not only of impulses from vernal woods but also of the mind of man, and his volumes All That Blue Can Be and Beyond have a metaphysical and at times even mystical quality, as well as a subtly refined technical confidence.

On the surface Turner's poems are lucid in sense, vigorous in tone, and full of a sinewy rhythmic energy, but complex structures and sound patterns often lie beneath, as in "Drain":

The sun glints through the trees
and the sky is suddenly blue, not
blue, then blue again; and
close to tears, you remember
you used to think
that you were lost. Back
 
you go, back to
the drain
before it fills again
with all that isn't blue
and can't be
if you are
all that blue can be.

The lucidity remains and is a welcome strength. Turner is not interested in ciphers or trickeries, and he even likes to give thematic coherence to his volumes.

Because he lives at a distance from literary centers, Turner's distinctive and substantial work has not been widely recognized, despite his having won the Commonwealth poetry prize in 1978 and the New Zealand Book award for poetry for Beyond. Among other achievements he is an excellent sportsman and sports writer, and perhaps it is the balance such experience brings that saves his work from any merely literary indulgence.

It is important to see, however, that Turner's strengths are more than the sum of his omissions. Certainly he is never indulgent or phony in craft or content, but more significantly he writes with an integrity of experience and language drawn from the land he so positively inhabits. His nature poetry is thus of that best kind, which works as directly as the sun and the rain. His poems, which are centered in human emotions, relationships, and memories, treat their growth and decay as naturally and caringly as if they were trees and grass, as in "Remind Me Tomorrow":

		I know, I know,
nothing's true
except what you happen to believe in.
I believe in the brief wind
that functions intermittently
and noses like a hedgehog
in a scurry of leaves:
		I believe
trees listen and gossip and say
If we can live with the wind
you can live with anyone.

—Roger Robinson