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Bone On Bone
Bone on Bone mixes grand reflections on life, love and mortality with razor-sharp haiku on the things that often escape attention. New Zealand's rugged geography - hills, mountains, rivers and bush - and equally weathered people are all lovingly captured in this winning and powerful collection.
150 pages, Paperback
Published September 17, 2017
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
September 15, 2024
This is a very grown up work, full of dust and hope, plus some exquisite gristle and marrow to chew on where other poets would find only calcification. The book is Wellington poet John Boyd’s outstanding exploration of our mortality.
His cover photograph gives us a clue, a stray dog convulsing joyfully in a graveyard at the chance to really suck the marrow out of lives - often spent in quiet desperation - which now lie waiting for him to chew on. Boyd smatters his book with both hakas and photographs, pixelled images framing the poetic storybooks that are his real accomplishment here. His poetry is bone dry, skeletal, calcified, seeking the core of our humanity in our own flesh-filled frames. He makes allowance only for love, which raises our dust-bound frames into something elegaic.
And so to the poems, laced with Boyd’s own love of his own country, and his women. In “Mothers milk” he compares the mountain Te Wharangi’s physicality and sensuality with that of a woman:
"High above the bushline
The curves and folds
Of Te Wharangi
Sprawl like a sleeping woman
Pushing aside the sheets
Naked for the sake of coolness"
Boyd expresses the physical nature of God like a modern Blake, claiming that:
“I am broken on these bluffs
Under a pastel horizon scrubbed to purity
Where the bones of history grind
Against the thinning sinews of memory”
Everywhere in Boyd’s collection you see Blake, and Eliot, also Dylan and Nick Cave, and even of Johnny Cash, who famously sang “ I’m dropping like a stone - lonesome to the bone.”
This is Boyd at his best - not drowning but waving at us, secure in his godless philosophy of a man and a woman secure in their (albeit temporary) Eden. For Boyd, the ghost of electricity howls in the bones of his women’s (and his country’s) face, and we are all the better for it.
Boyd poses a final question which harks back to the cover page - his own unfathomable challenge that, as Dylan said - “If dogs run free, why can’t we?”, or as Boyd puts it in his “Teachings from apostles...”;
The game is hard
But the goal is simple
As you move ever closer
To becoming a memory
Strive to be the person
Your dog thinks you are
A stunning work.
His cover photograph gives us a clue, a stray dog convulsing joyfully in a graveyard at the chance to really suck the marrow out of lives - often spent in quiet desperation - which now lie waiting for him to chew on. Boyd smatters his book with both hakas and photographs, pixelled images framing the poetic storybooks that are his real accomplishment here. His poetry is bone dry, skeletal, calcified, seeking the core of our humanity in our own flesh-filled frames. He makes allowance only for love, which raises our dust-bound frames into something elegaic.
And so to the poems, laced with Boyd’s own love of his own country, and his women. In “Mothers milk” he compares the mountain Te Wharangi’s physicality and sensuality with that of a woman:
"High above the bushline
The curves and folds
Of Te Wharangi
Sprawl like a sleeping woman
Pushing aside the sheets
Naked for the sake of coolness"
Boyd expresses the physical nature of God like a modern Blake, claiming that:
“I am broken on these bluffs
Under a pastel horizon scrubbed to purity
Where the bones of history grind
Against the thinning sinews of memory”
Everywhere in Boyd’s collection you see Blake, and Eliot, also Dylan and Nick Cave, and even of Johnny Cash, who famously sang “ I’m dropping like a stone - lonesome to the bone.”
This is Boyd at his best - not drowning but waving at us, secure in his godless philosophy of a man and a woman secure in their (albeit temporary) Eden. For Boyd, the ghost of electricity howls in the bones of his women’s (and his country’s) face, and we are all the better for it.
Boyd poses a final question which harks back to the cover page - his own unfathomable challenge that, as Dylan said - “If dogs run free, why can’t we?”, or as Boyd puts it in his “Teachings from apostles...”;
The game is hard
But the goal is simple
As you move ever closer
To becoming a memory
Strive to be the person
Your dog thinks you are
A stunning work.
June 4, 2018
There's hope for me yet - based on this poor collection of words...
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews