Alan Roddick reads twelve of his poems

Alan Roddick reads twelve of his poems

1. The Waits
2. Gotcha!
3. Catch and Release
4. Firewood
5. For Peter Matheson At 80
6. A Good Axe
7. My Last Poem
8. At Bluecliffs
9. The Slip
10. A Wee Dance
11. 4.15pm Trichologist
12. Careless

Recorded September 2023 at Plan 9 Studios, Wellington

Writing poems now in my ninth decade, I sometimes need words from my childhood which, to my grandchildren, can sound like a foreign language. The first poem in this selection is one such, with its words for out-of-date currency and the weights and measures I grew up with. 

Words have meanings, but they also make their own music, on the page and on the voice. I hope my words here show you something of what prompted them: occasions from daily life, such as wielding my splitting axe to have ‘conversations with the wood’, or perhaps ‘completing a poem, beginning the next book…’ but whatever it is, knowing that I am ‘lucky still to be preoccupied. Getting on.’   

Nine of these poems are in Next (Otago University Press, 2022), ‘The Slip’ is from Getting It Right (OUP, 2016), and I have also included two more recent poems.

Alan Roddick