Bonfires on the Ice

Dipping into Harry Ricketts’ new collection Bonfires on the Ice is like opening the door to a dear family friend – one whose familiarity embraces moods whimsical, fleetingly happy, often philosophical, but never pessimistic. His first poem embodies all these characteristics: in it, he explains the state of happiness as “A matter of collision: / Right place, right time”.

My delight in metaphor is lit anew by Tangle, in which the image of life as a tangle is sustained throughout. “Now there’s a terrific word, handy / for describing the way life baffles”, the poet begins, and goes on to milk the metaphor for all its worth! There’s a touch of the esoteric in the reference to the linguistic root of the word “tangle”, but we are rescued from puzzlement by an explanation.

How could I not relate to The Lecture 3 with its connotations of classrooms, lecture material, and student reactions? “Most lecturers become / Ancient Mariners in the end” is part regret but mostly philosophical resignation. And the students? Oh boy, Harry – were we students seen through? All those years and yawns ago?

A section of so-called Stella poems features whom Ricketts calls a kind of alter ego. She embodies his philosophy, reflecting alone in nature and reading German books: she writes “Now you must learn / the grammar of grief, the exact syntax / of suffering.” What stellar examples of metaphor and alliteration! References to everyone from novelist Thomas Pynchon to grief counsellor Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and everywhere from Eketāhuna to Mākara enliven throughout.

A delightfully ironic tribute to the western genre of filmmaking appears in A Weakness for Westerns. “Of course there’s almost everything / wrong with Westerns”, our poet begins, and then proceeds to tell us what’s irresistible about them anyway!

Harry Rickett’s poetry fuses the scholarly and the humanitarian with the ease of an old hand steeped in whimsicality and kindness. It’s a winning combination.