Fifteen years it took poet Ben Brown to shape his new book, ‘This Imperfect Light,’ – a collection that is part retrospective, part confessional and part conversation with one of Aotearoa’s greatest artists, the late Bill Hammond.
The collection is made of 80 poems, in four sections, with twelve illustrations from Hammond and it all began when Ben Brown found his nerve to ask the painter if he’d consider illustrating some poems.
“I approached Bill in about 2011. There’s a poem in the collection called ‘Provenance with Bill‘, and it starts “Having a wine with Hammond at the Lava Bar, one summer evening, between earthquakes.” I liked Bill’s work, but more than that, I liked Bill’s whole ethos: twenty-five years, the poorest man in town, but he just believed in his art. He went to his studio everyday and just determined one day, it would be okay. I’m a writer, I get up every day and write something and believe it’s all going to be okay. There was a bit of legend about Bill, not to talk to him about his art when he was having a drink at the bar. But this one night, I decided I was just going to hit him up. I bought him a glass of red, and I just said, “Have you ever worked with poetry before?” and he said, “Yes, I did, and it was a bastard.” But I pressed on and said, “Look if I dropped off half a dozen poems, would you have a look at them?” and he said, “Drop them off and I’ll have a look.”
The very next night, Ben took a pile of poems and left them at Bill’s house. Years went by and Ben heard nothing back from the artist.
“Then one day I was walking along the street, and I saw him walking up to me. He said, “I’ve got something for you,” and pressed a paper bag up to my chest, and said, “Do what you f*****g like with them.”
Inside the bag, were twelve A4 prints, silver on black drawings.
At that time, Hammond was at the height of his powers, and Ben was still early in his career. The drawings inspired him to take his work more seriously.
“I hadn’t even published my first collection, and here is this top shelf New Zealand artist putting his faith in me, and I had to up my game. I had two or three goes at trying to come up with some poems that would do this art justice. I guess I found it intimidating.”
The poems and artwork were filed away for several years, while Ben ruminated on how to best honour the work, and in 2022, he was asked to write a poem to celebrate the creativity in Otautahi. His poem, ‘Rest Easy, Bill’ was a kind of eulogy for Hammond, who had died the year before.
But the poet felt the poem wasn’t quite finished, and months later the last verse came to him.
‘Now that we know
the mind of a mortal man
with no compunction
but to try and understand
this imperfect light.’
That last verse would then give Ben the impetus he needed to begin the work of creating, ‘This Imperfect Light.’
“It named the project, it named the book, and it gave me a motif to work with.”
He credits his daughter, Sophie Taylor-Brown, with selecting the poems, and shaping the content of the book.
“My daughter came up with the structure. She wrangled the poems into order. She came up with the whole concept really. The book is broken down into four parts with 20 poems in each section, twelve of them are haiku, and it also has three images in each section.”
When Ben looks through the collection on his computer, he recognises the poems not only by their words, but by the shape they make on the page. It seems almost like an exhibition on the page of both words and images.
“It really is,” Ben agrees. “I write poems because they’re the only thing I can do to really express the thoughts I want to express. It can be a simple thing, or a complex thing, but it’s how I express myself.”
While Ben didn’t write the poetry in response to the images, he finds that the works talk to each other.
“There’s a lot of detail in the images, little motifs and some direct connections with my words. Ritual, religious aspects and in the geography. Direct and indirect references to Lyttelton. So, the words and images are having a conversation.”
And not just that – the book speaks to the poet, the artist and their hometown of Lyttelton.
“I’d like to think he’d be happy with it. For me, I feel like I’ve been able to do justice to his art.”
The book is launched on Saturday 29 August at 6pm at the Ōhinehou Coffee Company in Lyttelton.