In an instructive poem by Kevin Ireland called A New Year's Message to all our Writers, there is a wonderful line that sent me racing for my New Shorter Oxford: "At last we all have more than enough to furphy about."
What was this word? Was it somethingto do with Firpo's end of the golden weather, but surely not at New Year? No, it wasn't. I was thrilled to find it there. "Furphy sanitary carts were manufactured by the Furphy family at Shepparton, Victoria, during the 1914-18 war. It also has come to mean a false report or rumour; an absurd story."
Squinting over the dictionary, I could hear the echo of a wry chuckle from Ireland himself. There he goes again, I thought, endlessly amused and often gobsmacked by the weird world that dances and spins all around him, a world he has never stopped loving, a world that he manages to haul in and bag and fillet in a single bittersweet phrase.
Ireland's 15th collection of poems, Walking the Land, is another treat from the Devonport poet who showed us in his award-winning memoirs that he is unafraid of gazing without blinking into the mirror of his life.
His poems are darts of restrained emotion dipped in fearless ink, that reach their target with smart-bomb accuracy, always just the right length for their subject matter. But if they are marvellous intellectual missiles, they are always launched with peace and reconciliation in mind, bureaucrats and politicians thankfully aside.
There are affectionate, lyrical tributes to friends and family, combining layers of meaning in a single line. Ireland's empathy and advanced self-awareness mean that his observations about the world around him, sometimes dry and ironic, always witty, are ultimately slung with a gentle patience.
Like Ireland, Peter Bland has spent lengthy periods out of New Zealand — he was born in Yorkshire and emigrated in 1954 — and as with Ireland's editing career in the print media, which included the Times of London and the New Zealand Listener, Bland has a distinguished, international acting and directing career behind him.
