Portrait With Mandolin
The Depot was pleased and honoured to host the launch of Gary Mutton’s book of poems Portrait With Mandolin last Sunday 3rd February. Gary has a long and laudable history as a writer of poetry which contemporary Denys Trussell describes in his introduction to the book as “speaking of the world, and the world is forever, without end and existent…..Poetry then becomes a way of making actual, of making what has always been real per se, more real to us.” A gathering of friends, admirers and fellow poets appreciated meeting up again with Gary, some after 40 years, and savoured the poems he selected to read, matter-of-factly, without flourish, seated, leaning over his work as if still pondering it as a living thing, not consigned with finality to a page once completed. So with the poem whose title is the book’s namesake.
“Of disciplined intent I will not tire.
Young hands I have. Old joy I bring.
Yet I but sing of trivial shames.
Force out on my own, soon I must.
Deepened song I will learn to sing.
For the mandolin’s pangs still play
the mystery
as great mind shines nightly above the sea.”
(Portrait with Mandolin)
It was also a pleasure to welcome some of those who have featured on the Cultural Icons series; visual artist, painter, print maker and film director, Claudia Pond Eyley, who has been completing her documentary on Helen Clark, poet, ecologist, biographer, pianist, teacher and Cultural Icons patron, Denys Trussell, and respected New Zealand poet, anthologist, editor and fiction writer Alistair Paterson.
By Linda Blincko
Ruru Karaitiana and Gary Mutton. Bell, Brian Rodney, 1929-2000 :Photographs of Brian Bell, Warren Dibble, Ruru Karaitiana and Gary Mutton. Ref: PAColl-4090-3. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. http://natlib.govt.nz/records/22417088
