d r i n k s t e r: A TRUE POEM FOR MICK'S PERFECT EARS

“Sod the wine, I want to suck on the writing. This man White is an instinctive writer, bloody rare to find one who actually pulls it off, as in still gets a meaning across with concision. Sharp arbitrage of speed and risk, closest thing I can think of to Cicero’s ‘motus continuum animi.’

Probably takes a drink or two to connect like that: he literally paints his senses on the page.”

DBC Pierre (Vernon God Little, Ludmila’s Broken English, Lights Out In Wonderland ... Winner: Booker prize; Whitbread prize; Bollinger Wodehouse Everyman prize; James Joyce Award from the Literary & Historical Society of University College Dublin)

19 October 2011

A TRUE POEM FOR MICK'S PERFECT EARS

Hymn For Michael Wordley
on the occasion of his 50th birthday

beyond the fence trees fizz

the close trees,
hitch-hikers from the north,
are giant rustling grasses:
the silent eucalypts admit them

they bounce and pop with birdies
dancing a bonnie bagatelle
while their silverbacks do politics

if it had different colour
- not all green like this -
it would explain the Chinese invention of fireworks

above me the hands of man have made a patio of oregon
with American vines strangling American wood, anti-clockwise,
while beneath this poem a Jarrah bench swells

welling against the tracks of the planing machine
it wants its old shape back

behind surges a mighty house in which a family happened
smitten with timber and sound it survived the Jesus thing

smug as mud

and lets herbs and fowls through the door to make more

there is no emptyness
but much where nothing is

Philip White

.