Black Gold

Black Gold is an evocative title and one that captures the theme and content of this collection. With James K. Baxter as its inspiration, the poems metaphorically dig into the soil of Aotearoa and celebrate the treasures therein. Here are names and places we recognise with nostalgia and praise, poetically framed by writer Mark Pirie.

In the first eponymously titled section, we learn that the author keeps a notebook, just as Clive James did, in which he stores literary tips and gems. “Poets mine for gold,” he says, “of similes, metaphors, symbols, onomatopoeia, rhetoric, metonymy…” Great vocabulary for budding poets.

Closer to home is a homage to poet, publisher, and Paekākāriki railway bookseller Michael O’Leary. In Labouring, Pirie likens O’Leary to poet Hart Crane, who dropped out of school to become a labourer: “Like Crane / you moved between the twin worlds of the academy / and the earthiness of the street.” Such double-sided life experience is recommended: second tip for budding poets!

In the section titled Tangi is a heartfelt tribute to poet Hone Tuwhare and his poetry collection Small Holes in the Silence. In On Reading Small Holes in the Silence, Pirie describes his admiration for Tuwhare thus: “Hone you were a Giant Kauri, / Still are. How would my / small roots be around you?” Memories and tributes to family members also feature.

And what about the section titled Black Sheep? I hadn’t heard of Edward Tregear, a British immigrant, who, the poet tells us “then lived for months with the Māori / never sighting the Pākehā / you left behind.” He wrote several books, plus a dictionary of Māori-Polynesian words and founded the Polynesian Society. “Only imaginative people really live,” Tregear is quoted as saying, and he was surely one of them.

The real black sheep are a bunch of boy racers in a poem of the same name whom Pirie remembers with fondness from his student days. This is a racy account!

James K. Baxter died at just 46. The 46 Pirie poems of Black Gold honour one of our greatest literary figures.