Our absurd, yearning lives: launching Lyrical Ballads and What to Wear

On 11 February 2026, we gathered with a huge crowd at Unity Books Wellington to celebrate new books from two beloved poets. We were very lucky to have Robyn Marsack visiting from Scotland to launch Lyrical Ballads by Bill Manhire and What to Wear by Jenny Bornholdt. Robyn's wonderful speech is shared below.

 

Jenny Bornholdt signing books after the launch.

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It’s said that you should never judge a book by its cover, but here are two exceptional books whose covers absolutely do them justice. So do buy them for their good looks as well as their contents. Congratulations to the publisher and designers!

I’m thrilled to have a part in this launch in my hometown. When I have introduced Bill Manhire and Jenny Bornholdt in the UK, of course I have listed their various awards and distinctions, but here there is no need: they are loved and honoured in their own country. They have both been Poets Laureate. In Scotland we call ours the ‘Scots Makar’, makar being the old Scots word for poet. It is less about glory – the laurel leaves – and more about the ongoing task, or vocation, of making. The appearance of new collections is testament to this work of the poet, which both Bill and Jenny disguise in their seemingly effortless, unshowy poems.

When I first saw the title of Bill’s book, Lyrical Ballads, I thought: that’s quite cheeky! And also: perhaps only a poet who lives at the edge of the universe would dare to re-use the title of Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s groundbreaking collection, published in 1798. I did wonder what it would have been like if Wordsworth had been known as ‘Bill’ or ‘Billy’ – probably he wouldn’t have been published at all- and if Manhire had been known as ‘William’ – a different sort of poet altogether, I suspect, writing in the 1940s. (Maybe smoking a pipe.) 

Yet the two have something in common. Let me quote from Wordsworth’s ‘Advertisement’ to his volume: 

The majority of the following poems are to be considered as experiments. They were written chiefly with a view to ascertain how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purpose of poetic pleasure.

Bill, too, is experimenting with poetic forms in this collection, while maintaining the vernacular, with a particular New Zealand tone it seems to me: laconic, nothing fancy, but often surprising. I understand that he was at one stage an accomplished magician at children’s parties. Sometimes what he pulls out of his poet’s sleeve would – it must be said – have shocked Wordsworth.

In these poems there are snatches of the past, of childhood, adolescence, family life – almost all of them ending unexpectedly, wrong-footing the reader. The narrators and characters who inhabit the book – Alexander and his nana, Dracula, T.S. Eliot, a prime minister, a boy from Gaza, various misfits – are often puzzled themselves, sometimes humorous, sometimes (as the blurb says) curmudgeonly, at others simply sad.

The title poem is a compact story of ecological and personal desolation that begins: ‘I bought a bend in the river. It was a good, quiet bend. You couldn’t see round the corner, then you could.’ That seems emblematic of the trajectory of the poems in this collection: at first you can’t see round the corner and then you can: there’s a sense of more than the poem coming to an end. They are ballads of being here on this battered earth, lyrics of our absurd, yearning lives.

I got up this morning, looked out the window and asked my husband, unthinkingly, ‘What to wear?’ He replied, ‘That would make a good title’ – and it does! It seems a characteristically casual phrase: it could be a question, an instruction, even a vexation, so already it’s richly suggestive. What we wear has two functions: it fits us for an occasion or activity, and it’s the way we present ourselves to the world. It’s not casual, after all, it’s existential, and some of Jenny’s poems pose existential questions: ‘Why wear socks / when your days / are numbered.’ There’s illness here and ageing, swimming and gardening; life with sons and life as a daughter; there are video games, funerals, a bus ride next to fruit crumble, plums to gather. The poet paints our lives with deep compassion; she catches intonations and overheard dialogue with the ear of a musician. 

There is, in the extraordinary ‘Poem with a hole in it’, an excavation of ground that is also an excavation of language itself: the poem throws out word after word, trying them on for fit, heaping words up like so much discarded clothing.

Her similes are beautifully apt, surprising us into recognition: days ‘pulling waves / up to the beach as if inviting them / to a party’; a thrush, ‘tentative, / speckled like a mother declining’; days ‘like waves, / each one egging its sister on’. In ‘MRI’, the instruction is to ‘Lie / very still, like a Finlander / in wait /for a bear’. Even if our lives are ‘like bad knitting’, as one poem has it, another says, ‘mercifully, occasionally / one sees marvellous things’. We do – more than occasionally – in this haunting collection.

What a joy and privilege it is to have two such poets writing for us now.