Jamie Hanton

Just started reading Wellington poet Geoff Cochrane’s second collection of poems, Into India . What I love most about Cochrane’s work is the utter lack of superfluousness. If he doesn’t need it, he doesn’t use it. Such precise language allows him to step into the darkness and float rather than sink under some self-absorbed malaise. As Bernadette Hall notes in her review Into India touches on, “Love and love lost. The sombre turnings of memory. Our awful, human capacity to do harm. Yet this is not a depressing book, nor one weighted with self-pity.”

Here’s one of my early favourites from the collection:

Fountain

The clear water spills.
Dragonflies and sparrows
look, look for silver.

Though there can never be
reason for optimism,
here in the soil near the pool
is a butt left by another smoker,
white-tipped, a woman’s.

(Page 18, Into India, Geoff Cochrane, 1999, Victoria University Press)

Tags: Geoff Cochrane, Poetry, Writing