Two short poems by Vincent O'Sullivan

Skol

A man I talked with in a bar in Berlin

once read poetry, he said, with passion, served

with distinction in an army he loathed. Beyond

which he said little. He drank Schnapps. He advised,

as we parted, to avoid epiphanies as I would gunfire.

His phrase for ordering a Schnapps was 'to dim the lights'.

The sentiment of goodly things

The birds are back at the feeder

now the air is warmer.

                                  They come and go

in a way reminding me of keys in old

typewriters, flitting up and there for a second,

gone as another arrives.

                                    I don't quite

catch at what it is they're typing,

something, one fancies, about enjoying

the fact of again and again.

                                           I hope that's

what they're writing. It must be,

the way the keys keep coming back.

© Vincent O'Sullivan

Being Here: Selected Poems, Victoria University Press, 2015

Reproduced on The Tuesday Poem with permission.

Editor: Jennifer Compton

I was lucky enough to be in Wellington for the launch of this gorgeously attired, and stuffed-with-natural-goodness, book. It was a jolly fine night, fueled with excellent local wines and provender, and then me and my mate Coral, (Aussie mate from WA, second day ever in NZ) walked back along Lambton Quay and came upon the statue representing Katherine Mansfield, that Vince had had a hand in selecting (I found out later at a luncheon in Dunedin), and I took her hand and Coral took a blurry pic. Just one of those nights, you know. Well, when it came to the reading of the book, it had that same kind of well-fueled, insouciant, stroll-the-midnight-streets, head-spinning, I-think-I-finally-see-the-point-of-it-all, effect. And here comes a lucky convergence! Poetry can do that, and I think it should.
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Vincent O’Sullivan is one of New Zealand’s leading writers, author of the biography of John Mulgan, Long Journey to the Border, the novels Let the River Stand and Believers to the Bright Coast, and many plays and collections of short stories and poems. He is joint editor of the five-volume Letters of Katherine Mansfield and has edited a number of major anthologies. He lives in Dunedin, and is the out-going NZ Poet Laureate.

To find out more, you may like to click here. 

Today's editor, Jennifer Compton, lives in Melbourne. Her poem, 'Now You Shall Know', won the Newcastle Poetry Prize in 2013, and the collection of the same name was published this year in Australia, while her long poem Mr Clean and The Junkie  was published in New Zealand as part of the Hoopla series 2015 (Mākaro Press). 

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