Vincent O’Sullivan’s poems are just so damned good.
I try hard to play the Martian, deceive myself that I don’t know the poems in The Movie May Be Slightly Different are written by one of New Zealand’s Most Honoured and Most Esteemed, and judge them as I would judge any other new 
volume of New Zealand verse. But my self-deception breaks down very quickly.
To begin with, only Most Esteemed can nowadays get volumes of poetry this capacious published, unless they are Collected Poems. The Movie May Be Slightly Different is at least twice the length of the average new collection: 119 new poems in 150 pages.
To go on with, you’re just a few pages in when you know you’re in the company of a master. The poems are so meaty, so pithy, so well crafted, so damned good.
I puzzle a bit over why they are divided into three long sections. Does it mean anything more than date of composition or poet’s whim? Perhaps.
I think I detect more of childhood recall in the first section, but memory now informed by experience; freshness and obsolescence paired in a poem like The child at the Exhibition.
I hear more intimations of mortality in the second section: poems about a funeral in Wellington’s Old St Paul’s (“the church where agnostics are sent off from”), soliloquies of a Bolshie old codger in a retirement home (Sedition in the Ranks) and a wicked elder’s deflation of arty pretensions (Supporting the Arts). Midnight chimes.
As for the third section, much of it is affirmation. Not effusive hand-clapping affirmation, but affirmation of solid things from a man who’s been around the block a bit. Affirmation of other poets (Emily Dickinson, CP Cavafy, Rainer Maria Rilke, James K Baxter). Affirmation of landscape. Affirmation of beasties (fantail, eagle, two on a pet dog). Qualified affirmation of a sort of God.
So maybe it’s a collection moving through death to the positive. And maybe it’s not as straightforward as that, because right in the middle of the affirmation section you get a piece of kick-in-the-pants satire like Plane People and my whole interpretation falls apart. Each poem is a separate entity after all.
I’ll say the obvious things. O’Sullivan can move with apparent ease into traditional metres and rhyme schemes when he wishes. But it’s the ease of a tried craftsman who never lets the form strangle the language. The art seems artless, the voice unforced. Sometimes you think you’re in a casual ramble until you notice how dense the vocabulary is.
These are the poems of a civilised man. An ironist who isn’t sardonic, a romantic who knows romanticism isn’t enough. A treasure house.
THE MOVIE MAY BE SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT, by Vincent O’Sullivan (VUP, $30).
Nicholas Reid is a writer, poet and historian. He guest edited Poetry New Zealand 41.