A Riderless Horse

I was Dick. I teased Anne and George. I was Edmund, betrayed my friends for a sweet. Something rotten in me. — from ‘My childhood’ In his third poetry collection, award-winning poet Tim Upperton takes us to the end of the driveway, over the Manawatu – twisting like an eel – and on to Topeka and Paris. These are poems of acid wit (‘I have been to Paris / and apart from the architecture / and the food and some very fine cemeteries / and of course the language / it’s quite like Palmerston North’), intimations of loss (‘The wrong life cannot be lived rightly. I should know’) and unexpected resolution (‘like pollen, / like grace so available nobody wanted it’). Unpredictable and restive, A Riderless Horse stands in the everyday and then runs with it.