TIGERS OF THE MIND by MICHAEL MORRISSEY

Some writers pace themselves for the sprints or middle-distance in short story collections or maybe a novel or two.

Others, like Michael Morrissey, are long-distance runners.

Morrissey's new collection of poems Tigers of the Mind is his 14th and stands alongside a novel, two novellas and a couple of shorter fictions, scripts for two stage plays, a work of non-fiction and his memoir Taming the Tiger.

That is quite some output in the half century since he first appeared and along the way he has written innumerable reviews, edited anthologies, taught creative writing, had a brief tenure as a feature writer at the New Zealand Herald and had the harrowing account of bi-polarity and hospitalisation told in Costa Botes 2011 documentary Daytime Tiger.

Tigers as an image run through Morrissey's work, wild and untamed creatures, sometimes toothless but always alert.

This current collection – some work having appeared in other publications – shows the old tiger not slowing down but still capable of bite and a lyrical swiftness with memorable images: “Auckland's green quiescence conceals volcanic mischief”; “dead as a document”; “orange stripes of dawn make nonsense of the night”; “stripped of gooey metaphor, my mother was a good person”.

And of his father, “My father did everything with passion. Snoring, drinking and being Irish. Quick to lose his temper, slow to retrieve the bitch”.

These are powerful poems in this collection but Morrissey is not without humour.

One piece is Please God Not Another Poem About Nature, others are Poem For a Large Rodent and Tricky But Here Goes.

He also has a self-deprecating quality.

In Sonnet for Two Champs he opens with “Muhammad Ali and I were born in the same year. Meaning? Same age, never to meet” and then notes their obvious difference Ali/tall, he not so tall, Ali/black, he nor so black.

But Morrissey too was a champion, “of knucklebones in the St Peters spring of 1953. It's been downhill ever since . . .”

There is solitude evoked (Walking Home, “the taxi stand vacant as an advertising jingle”), childhood horrors recounted (In The Year of Our Lord “Mum went mad and I was boarded out at St Joseph's where I learned how to fight over a piece of buttered bread”) and memories of earlier times, fragments of history, stories told or heard.

And quiet, domestic poems.

As in Making Breakfast where he can hear his wife in the kitchen chopping fruit and vegetables, “each sound has its own precision, delicate but unwavering, surgical as a lobotomist's knife . . . it may sound like fruit being cut, but really it's the sound of love”.

Michael Morrissey deploys words and images like grenades or the touch of a feather as required.

TIGERS OF THE MIND by MICHAEL MORRISSEY Aries Press, 3/20 Rosebank Road, Papatoetoe, Auckland 2024 $25