Stunning Debut of the Repairing of a Life
by Leigh Davis,
Otago University Press, $39.95
Stunning Debut of the Repairing of a Life is the volume which won the 2009 Kathleen Grattan Award for Poetry, chosen by judge Ian Wedde from over 90 scripts. The author, Leigh Davis, sadly died before the
honour was announced. He had suffered a brain tumour and these poems, really one long one, were his effort to return to normal mental health after surgery and radiation treatment. The unusual title stems from the subtitle of the Listener review by Nick Bollinger at the book's first appearance in 2008.
Davis (1955-2009) was born in Wanganui, graduated with a MA from Auckland University and went on to a business administration degree at Victoria University - founding a private equity firm afterwards.
He married, had four children and was a Renaissance man - active in literary publishing with Roger Horrocks - critic, essayist and poet himself.
His effort to overcome his physical condition drove what must have been an enormous hurdle for his editors who reproduced his immediate handwritten scrawls. What is most impressive is for a reader to divide that gradual improvement of control, of mind and handwriting, resolved into graceful, normal, printed script formatted generally into two-line couplets of unrhymed verse.
The tragedy of Davis' crisis is, for us, the loss of an accomplished poetic mind. There are striking images in his vision of his immediate and past life, his love of his wife Susan and the immediacy of his confrontation with approaching death. The religious background surfaces from time to time, much in the manner of John Donne and his fellows. Leigh Davis' strength of mind through 300 pages or so of fine poetry brings admiration and deep regret for what might have been.
