Slow Fires, Leonard Lambert, Cold Hub Press, 2024

At the far end of autumn,
the very edge of winter,
the last of the leaves are a-skelter—
a horde of panicky late-goers
some aloft and wind-mad

 

from ‘Leaving’

Leonard Lambert’s new poetry collection is a beautiful and wry contemplation in late afternoon light, a slow-paced wander through the nooks and niches of old age. The poetry travels through the physical shift in seasons, things that come to the fore and matter, things that slip away and matter so much less. As we move through the poems, wander becomes wonder, and living each day so very precious.

At the core are recurring thoughts and motifs of home, whether fugitive or regained, whether the figure caught by the camera panning finds his way home, or the ghost, or the good luck called to the discharged patient. In ‘Karrinyup Optical Clinic’, Leonard muses on his British parents relocating to New Zealand and Australia, yet never successfully transplant. The poet muse poignantly switches back to himself:

How far-flung & scattered it all now seems,
and you listen for the tribal drum,
the home-song, and wonder if anywhere,
or everywhere, is where you belong.

The title poem, ‘Slow Fires’, resists the magnetism of extremes, ‘Love-Hate, Despair-Delight’, suggesting that in ‘Like & Quite-enjoy’ slow fires are more enduring. And yes, the warm embers are here, in memory retrieval, in the fickle movement of time, in the image of a past self, for example, when the ‘elderly artist returns to his studio after a prolonged post-exhibition break’ in the moving poem, ‘Freeze-frame’:

Old clothes (not so old) are thinner

than I recall, and leather,

so long to last, frays.

Cobwebbed overnight,

I watch this man in his shed

spinning out wonders, and wonder

to myself: was that ever me?

There is a musicality of reflection, the way lightness and seriousness (ah, two extremes with a prismatic bridge between?) overlap. Horizon lines shimmer, haunt and draw closer. Fears and hopes range from intense to faint. This slender chapbook will linger and settle in your inner poetry room long after you put the collection down.

Leonard Lambert (1945) is the author of seven collections of verse spanning almost as many decades. His Selected Poems, Somewhere in August (Steele Roberts) appeared in 2016, and his most recent publication is a chapbook, Winter Waves (Cold Hub Press, 2018). He is a full-time painter who lives in Napier.

Cold Hub page

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