We’ve lost another one.
After mourning the loss of Kevin Ireland in 2023, then Vincent O’Sullivan in 2024, the triumvirate has been completed by the death of Brian Turner yesterday.
Like Kevin and Vincent, I had had the pleasure of meeting Brian through CPC on a number of occasions. I can remember emceeing a reading at the MCB way back in the day, where he read with James Norcliffe – I think I made a joke about being between two of my favourite bearded Southern Men, and whoever the third poet was that night being insufficiently bearded or southern. (I know, hysterically funny.) (Oh god, was I the third poet?)
We had some lovely email exchanges when I was editing takahē, and I reviewed a couple of his books for the NZPS. But mostly he was a steady presence in the firmament, someone calmly doing his work, with a deep love of the land that resonated strongly with me. I’m not going to pretend we had a friendship, but he was always kind and friendly when our paths crossed. And used to occasionally tease me about Les Murray (for reasons that have slipped through the sieve-holes of my memory, but made sense at the time).
I can remember the first time I saw Brian read. It was a CPC event as part of Books and Beyond (yep, we’re talking about loooooooong time ago), and he was sharing the stage with (I think?) Kapka Kassabova and Dorothy Porter. I had only just begun venturing out into the poetry world, and I can remember sitting in the back of the Great Hall at the Arts Centre, watching and listening and drinking it in. I was still trying to understand what New Zealand poetry was all about and where my place in it might be. I remember how gentle and warm his voice was. Like … your favourite uncle, talking about something precious you both knew and loved. Something shared.
And he was funny too – I can still hear him reading “Taking It as It Comes”, with its self-deprecating litany and then that delightful (and delighted) turn at the end. I loved his humour, that was never just funny. The seeming simplicity of his language, and the skill it took to make that work. But the way he wrote about the experience of being in the natural world was the thing that caught me most strongly. He was a poet of the hills and the open sky. I can remember thinking then that there might be a place for me after all.
Go and read the portrait that Brian’s partner, Jillian Sullivan wrote back in 2022 for Newsroom. And then go and find his poems, and read them somewhere quiet, somewhere that you can see the sky and feel the sun.
And please, could we not lose anyone else for a while?
A Dark Feathered Art 