Lyrical Ballads

by Bill Manhire

Bill Manhire has always subscribed to Paul Valéry's definition of poetry as 'a prolonged hesitation between sound and sense'. In that spirit, many of the poems in this new, dazzling collection blend story and song, and do so using everyday words and phrases that – suddenly, on the page – become new and delightfully weird.

Lyrical Ballads is a many-peopled the baffled inhabitants of Every Street and Intermediate Street are here, while Dracula, T.S. Eliot and Bobby Outram from Outram have walk-on parts. The collection is anchored by two long sequences that embrace awkwardness, mystery and 'The Tobacco Tin', a kind of folk story riding along on its own lacunae, and 'Tell You What', a set of curmudgeonly opinions that evoke the prejudices of a fast-vanishing world.

As they notice the small collisions between wonder and everyday reality, and the trajectories of those who don't fit easily in this world, these poems close in on the darker certainties of our lives.

134 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 26, 2026

About the author

Bill Manhire was born in Invercargill in 1946. He was his country's inaugural Poet Laureate and has won the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry four times. He holds a personal chair at the Victoria University of Wellington, where he directs the celebrated creative writing programme and the International Institute of Modern Letters. His volume of short fiction, South Pacific, was published by Carcanet in 1994.

Reviews

[Marcus Hobson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sometimes it is very hard to put your finger on exactly what it is about Bill Manhire’s poetry that makes it so enjoyable. There has been so much and there is such variety. But then I reflected on which poems from Lyrical Ballads that I enjoyed the most and found myself left with a single line – a whole poem in fact, reduced to a single line:

No one should come to the door dressed like that.

That is all you have, nothing else in the poems around to give any context or background, nothing to warn you that it is approaching. Just that single line. It’s the humour. The great good humour of it. And the fact that more is left out of the poem than is put into it. Who is the speaker, exactly what did they see, and how bad could it have been to prompt that level of outrage? Was it a quiet back street or a bustling main road? I have so many questions, none of which will ever be answered. So there is the joy, it is left entirely up to my own torrid imagination to paint the scene in as many terrible ways as I wish.

There are five sections to this new collection. Only two of them have titles; the second called ‘The Tobacco Tin’, and the fourth called ‘Tell You What’. The contents do not list the names of the individual poems in these sections, even though there are lots in each.
The tobacco tin of the title belonged to a grandfather and is referenced in one of my favourite poems ‘I always approached’:

I always approached my grandfather cautiously. One time
he was sitting in a tent by the river which said, ‘This is a
relax product.’ The tent, that is. My grandfather was rolling
a cigarette.

‘Never take up this smoking thing,’ he said to me. ‘It’s a
filthy habit.’ He spat on the ground. ‘And try not to spit
either. Women don’t like it.’

He gave me his old tobacco tin. He said if I opened it, I
would be in serious trouble. Of course I did open it, a few
days after he died. Just some rather sad old nails.

Titles can be misleading for a moment, as with the poem called ‘Shining Cuckoo’, which did not head in the direction I was expecting at all:

But now it is time to visit the Shining Cuckoo rest home,
where a man called Eric is always taking off his trousers.
When the staff see this, they lead him away to his room.
Probably they beat him there. Probably he only takes off
his trousers to show his bruises. They are black and blue,
like bruises in a story. When the staff see this, they lead
him to his room. That is how a pattern gets established. His
underpants are green. They lead him to his room. Eric, they
say, we tell you and tell you. A dog barks in the distance.
Yes probably they beat him there.

If you could see a twinkle in the eye of the poet, then there it is, as the mischievous Mr Manhire pops this poem out in front of us.
Alexander appears several times in this section, as thought it is the name of the poet, or the author. ‘Whenever my grandfather saw me coming, he knelt and called, Alexander! That was never my name – but I always ran to his arms anyway.’ While at the start of the section we hear him again in ‘That might be Alexander’:

The phone rang.
Billo said: That might be Alexander. Quick answer it.
Hello, said Nana. Is that Alexander?
A voice said: Hello, I am a giant monkey who likes to ring
people up!
Goodbye, said Nana.

By the end of the section there is a different response:

Nana said. That is entirely wrong Alexander. I would
always want to talk to a giant monkey who likes to ring
people up.

I just love the sense of mischief and fun, just like we are being messed about by a small boy. Perhaps one that is called Alexander.

I recall Bill Manhire being interviewed in Christchurch in 2020, just after the publication of his last collection Wow. He made a number of comments about his and poetry readers’ relationship with the first person pronoun. For Bill, the I is not always him, and for readers this is not always easy to navigate. Paula Green, in her review of Wow, called Bill a ‘roving speaker’ and I think this remains just as true in Lyrical Ballads. There are certainly a couple of poems where the poet is not entirely on the same side as his subject. This, for example, is called ‘The Party’:

Over in the far corner is the man whose wife disappeared
when she went for a pedicure. She had saved for months,
and the last time anyone saw Iris Croake she was standing
on an escalator in a tall building in the mercantile district,
rising up to … where? Well, we all ask ourselves that now.
Croake has written many poems about this moment, all
rejected by sympathetic editors, who commonly attach a
handwritten note. He keeps referring to ‘the whole sorry
episode’. None of us want to talk to him.

A similarly infuriating acquaintance can be found in the poems called ‘Double Honk’:

My annoying friend no longer has the energy to be a pain
in the neck. He is tired. When he gets to his feet to go
home, he looks exhausted. We have known each other
for years and he has always annoyed me. Yet now I am
beginning to feel sorry for him. I wish I did not find him
so annoying, I wish I were a more generous person. My
poor friend can barely get into his car. Now he gives a
chirpy double honk on the horn. This is typical. Not the
honk so much as the double honk. I will be glad to see the
back of him.

And finally, just to show exactly what to expect, here are the five little couplets to be found in ‘Tell You What’:

One bird explains the sky to another.
That’s the way they operate.
+
In the 1950s all the boys had big ears.
Those were embarrassing years.
+
Every boy with his book.
Every sheep with its showground.
+
We used to call the stove the range.
I don’t see why that should have to change.
+
Raewyn keeps in touch.
I never liked her much.

Lovely little hints of nostalgia, the big ears and the sheep in showgrounds, the kitchen range, and always that sense of humour. Poor old Raewyn.

[Diane · Rating 5 out of 5]

"a prolonged presentation between sound and sense". You can feel that here.
After carefully reading through all the poems, sometimes going back over the words to rethink, sometimes stopping to consider, I was enveloped in a sense of melancholy, memory and loss. I feel there is much in here about the last part of a person's life: the odd childhood memories, the people long gone, the loss of a sense of place.

"Dusk
It's got me beat, the way
the hills just fall asleep."

This makes me see hills differently in a fascinating way. Waikato hills, Wellington hills, Taranaki hills, the lovely landscapes of my life. (I'm now 72).

"A Consultation
. . .
it's always good to get back
to the trees and the clouds
and the hills and the hawks and the horses". (final stanza)

This took me straight back to my childhood growing up in a small Waikato town. Is Manhire wanting us to realise that the first memories of our life are the strongest? But it's also about now: older, after medical consultations that leave you stripped of your sense of place in cold consulting rooms.

"Bygone:
It's odd isn't how one day these days
will end up being the old days." (First stanza)
looking at words, what they mean to us and an interesting idea that the present will almost instantly become the past, because really, there is no 'present'.

There are poems about the art of writing, how hard it is, how much fun it is. There are poems about the horrors of today, and the losses over our years.
I savoured all the words in this collection because it felt like I was reading my history as well. A lyrical and thoughtful read.