James Norcliffe, in his Landfall review, calls Manhire’s title “at once disingenuous and somewhat mischievous”. Maybe. I’ve started to suspect, re-reading the collection this weekend gone, that it’s best, sometimes at least, to take these poems, and this poet, as straight as you can. So much of the best of this book is “a homage paid to the native and naked dignity of man, to the grand elementary principle of pleasure”. It’s written using “the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation”. It is the “honourable characteristic” of this poetry that “its materials are to be found in every subject which can interest the human mind”, especially, in this case, Dunedin: its Botanic Gardens (“Our History lecturer”), its mysteries (“Explaining Dunedin”), its surroundings (“Outram”). There’s a hint at balladry in more than a few places - snatches of stories, at the least - and what I hear as an insistent kind of lyricism, a hovering around almost and not-quite-rhyme. Anne Kennedy writes somewhere (where?) about Manhire’s “distillations”. Lovely word! They’re on display here, too. And childhood, plenty of it. And melancholy. Manhire is “stepping westward” now, just like he always was.

The sound of the lyrical O!, bound to child and man by ‘natural piety’, is all through this collection, as is its terser counter-sound of “oh.” O is the signature Manhire vowel (“eventually we all shall go / into the dark furniture of the radio”), and the way O can sound elation, exhalation, deflated recognition and dismissal - from O! to ohhh to oh - is as good a guide as any to what I love about what’s at work here:

The world begins to drone.

You’re on your own.