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Abandoned Novel

Beach, David

Abandoned Novel introduces a strikingly different new voice to New Zealand poetry. These sixty decasyllabic sonnets are formally rigorous and bracingly anti-poetic. Beach takes ideas, information and units of language from many sources, and transforms them into lines that are both deliberately prosaic and mysteriously musical. From the opening evocation of a high-wire act, through highly ironic explorations of ideas of literary immortality, to a ceremony of at-home-ness in Bolton Street Cemetery, this first book traces a fascinating arc, and can be read and appreciated on many levels. David Beach was the winner of Australasia’s richest literary award — the prestigious Prize in Modern Letters 2007 for emerging New Zealand writers.

A poem is an opening line plus work. My
forte is the opening line but I toil
too. I bang my brain upon the page, read
through as far as I have got again and
again . . (‘Self-portrait 4’)

What led me to writing prose sonnets was, oddly enough, giving up writing any sort of poetry. I became a film reviewer instead. They were mostly short, capsule reviews. But then I decided I wanted to write poems after all, and so quit the reviewing. However I still wasn't sure what sort of poems to write. I tried various approaches, before finding myself writing prose sonnets. But the curious thing about prose sonnets, at least the kind I write, is that they have quite a similarity to capsule film reviews. So I regard my film reviewing stint as a creative writing course where I taught myself to write poems which are like capsule film reviews — David Beach.

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