Slim Volume, James Brown, Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2024

Love Poem

A chair is a good place to sit.
You spend a week with a poem.
Then another week. Not your poem. 
Somebody else’s. 

You become friends, then
very good friends.
You like the poem a lot. Maybe 
you are a little in love with the poem.

Every morning, the poem washes its limbs
in a mountain spring. 
You close your eyes and watch.
Then you talk to one another like water. 

This probably goes without saying
but you say it anyway.

James Brown

What better delight than to open James Brown’s eighth poetry collection, Slim Volume. The blurb on the back provides a perfect invitation to enter the collection’s cycling trails, its widening itineraries: ‘A slim volume of verse, like a bicycle, offers us fresh and joyful and sometimes troubling ways of seeing the world.’ In a nutshell, it’s why I love turning to poetry in states of emergency or dillydally and seek the electric currents of words.

Begin with notions of travel, the ever-shifting multifaceted view from cycle saddle, train window or pedestrian stroll. Whether cycling or walking, things catch the eye and ear, thoughts compound and connect, disintegrate and startle, and you move with the hum and whizzing wheels of memory and anticipation. Similarly poetry, whether reading or writing, is an exhilarating form of travel. Especially reading James Brown, especially savouring the sweet whirr of the line, the turning back for a second look to see things afresh, the unmistakable accumulation of physical joy.

Slim Volume draws you into the intimacy of letting things slip, of layering and leavening a collection so that in one light it is a portrait of making poetry, in another light the paving stones of childhood. The presence of people that matter glint, and then again, in further arresting light, you spot traces of the physical world. Try reading this as a poetry handbook and the experience is gold. There is an invitation to see any subject matter as ‘worthy’ of poems (for example, cheese in pies), musing on who wants to read angry poetry or wayward words or making poems your own. And am I stretching the communal art of making sandcastles to consider poetry as a communal art (oodles of theory on this)? Perhaps the poem that stuck the firmest is ‘Love Poem’ (poem above). It’s the best ode to reading a poem I have read in ages.

And that is exactly why I love this book so much. I am sitting back in the chair of reading and taking things slow, and then whizzing in downhill glee, and then it’s back to travelling slow. Savouring the wit, the power of looking, listening.

The readings

‘The Wedge of Light on a Chair’ from Slim Volume

‘This isn’t buying …‘ unpublished

James Brown‘s previous poetry collections are The Tip Shop (2022), Selected Poems (2020), Floods Another Chamber (2017), Warm Auditorium (2012), The Year of the Bicycle (2006), which was a finalist in the Montana New Zealand Book Awards 2007, Favourite Monsters (2002), Lemon (1999), and Go Round Power Please (1996), which won the Best First Book Award for Poetry. James works as an editor and teaches the Poetry Workshop at the International Institute of Modern Letters at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington.

Te Herenga Waka University Press page