Acetylene

Paperback, 139x215mm
80 pages

Published 2001

At the heart of Geoff Cochrane’s third full-length collection of poems is a moving sequence on the death of the poet’s father. Traceable in the poems that surround it are other narratives of loss and need: of an unconsummated love, and of a life at the very margin of the new economy. Geoff Cochrane’s poetry is at once lush and severe. There is no one else quite like him. 

My father dies;
I’m diagnosed as having … never mind; 
my longing for a leggy journalist 
is slowly starved to death.
Yes, where I heal I’m bland.
A coffee bar provides
festivity enough, my daily fix.
I read the blackboard chalked in limes and pinks:
Obey your thirst –
Bacon and Eggs, $6.00 –
Extract me the soldier from the sputnik.

Praise for Acetylene
‘… vivid and moving. The stirring sequence on the death of Cochrane's father is quite outstanding.’ —Hamish Wyatt, Otago Daily Times

‘Cochrane's poetry is both dirty and miraculous.’ —Salient

Geoff Cochrane is the author of sixteen collections of poetry, two novels, and Astonished Dice: Collected Short Stories (2014). Geoff received an Arts Foundation of New Zealand Laureate Award in 2014. In 2009 he was awarded the Janet Frame Prize for Poetry, and in 2010 the inaugural Nigel Cox Unity Books Award.