This Twilight Menagerie
Edited by Jamie Trower and Sam Clements
Poetry Live! $20
Forty years ago, the Auckland arts scene saw the launching of Poetry Live!, a weekly gathering of local bards and poetry aficionados. It originating at The Globe tavern on Wakefield St in 1980, under the founding leadership of the late David Mitchell, a poet of some national and international renown, and taking place in about a dozen more locales since then. Our city's peripatetic poets, numbered in their hundreds, or thousands even, at the events, have ranged from those who have scaled the heights of national recognition, including past and present poets laureate, to the struggling poetaster, floundering around, red-faced and stuttering, with their "forgive me, humble offerings". All were welcomed; none were turned away.
Over the many years, the diverse teams of MCs that run this event have released the odd "annuals" (in the looser sense of the word). This year's publication, however, is something even beyond this. To mark the 40th anniversary, This Twilight Menagerie, a significant 218-page poetry anthology has been launched, containing works from 79 poets, most still alive, but a few moved on to join their distant muses. And it is the combination of this history with the assortment of contributors that has rendered the current volume of special importance and calibre.
A number of the poets in the collection were about in the wild and frenetic days of the group's adolescence; others used to attend, but have since wandered into other (even if not always greener) pastures; and yet others are fresh and enjoying the new opportunities that a local, public platform affords them. But in all cases, these contributing poets have offered us a personal creation that they consider to be of some special quality, best fitting this unique occasion and tradition.
Because the editors this year have been able to choose from many artists and works, that selection has ended up being perhaps one of the finest collections produced in this country in a long time, one that will proudly sit alongside some of our larger, better-known anthologies. The poets, from all walks of life, all cultures, all personal histories, project one thing in common – their sheer love of poetry. And these personal histories and stories are laid bare, covering every topic from psychiatric crisis to the reassessment of one's grandmother, the conflicted death of a junkie friend, the outrageous death of twin babies, and yet others in a lighter vein, from the fascination in an octopus to that of the moon, to statues, to music.
