Poetry review – A DAY LIKE NO OTHER: Thomas Ovans considers a new and generous selection from James Norcliffe’s many collections
A Day Like No Other
James Norcliffe
Otago University Press
ISBN 9781991348166
176pp NZ445 UK£18.74
Writing in a London Grip review in 2016, Roger Caldwell observed that ‘James Norcliffe, the veteran New Zealand poet, deserves to be better-known in this country.’ We are pleased that this journal has on several occasions had a chance to bring his work to the notice of its readers — in 2012, 2020 and 2023. We now have a further opportunity as we consider A Day Like No Other which offers a new selection of Norcliffe’s poetry drawn from all ten of his collections since 1987.
A Day Like No Other includes a foreword by Erik Kennedy which outlines Norcliffe’s impressive career with its many achievements and awards. Kennedy also reminds us that, although Norcliffe comes from New Zealand (which might be seen as faraway and isolated), he has travelled widely – and indeed lived in other countries – and is in no way disengaged from world events, even the darkest ones. In a poem set during a visit to the Franz Josef glacier in New Zealand’s south island he writes
We hear Pol Pot has died again
but the reception is poor
the TV has cataracts double
vision and snow blindness
the heart of the glacier
is as hard cold and blue
as a carefully carried memory
ruthless and perfect
A later poem “The attack on Baghdad” responds to the Iraq war and the “Shock and Awe” bombing which began it. It describes the horrors indirectly
in the evening a rising wind
knocked the black peaches
from the laden branches
one by one they dropped
and some fell into the roses
where thorns tore at their flesh
Norcliffe looks at harsh truths in this oblique way not to soften them but rather to transform their ugliness to something so unexpected that it shocks us into seeing horror afresh. In a different tone, “How to dress for peace” suggests a fancifully radical way of escaping a cycle of violence. It gives gentle but firm instructions on removing all military equipment – from ammunition belt right down to underpants – so it can be replaced by ‘a long silk shift’ which is ‘white and has been/ neatly ironed’. Then, to complete the re-clothing, it points out
on the dresser
there is a small yellow harp
don’t leave without it
Norcliffe is also fond of tampering with reality when he writes about less momentous matters . Unrelated facts are combined to suggest fanciful conclusions:
the hardest soap
comes from Castile
the hardest steel
comes from Toledo
the Spanish must be
a soft good-tempered people
(“The true story of soap”)
Sometimes he goes further and puts real people or events in unlikely juxtapositions as in “Letters to Dr Dee from Fangshan” or “Villon in Millerton”. He also likes to view the world through the eyes of invented characters: his first collection includes a sequence about ‘the sportsman’ – a tightly focussed individual who ‘learned to avoid god/ as one who could probably/ knock his block off’ and who ‘did not tax god/ with awkward questions/ which would interfere/ with sport’. A later collection introduces the much less muscular ‘bookman’ who addresses his lover in ‘words that fall like water with/ the elegance of Garamond tracing// that fine line between anticipation/ and memory …’
Norcliffe’s poetry gives quite a lot of space to the earth’s many creatures which are not people –toads and frogs, sandflies and sea horses. A flock of turkey buzzards resembles ‘a scatter of iron filings but purposeful;/ black fillings in the mouth of the sky’. Rats (which evidently ‘like being tickled’) make mysterious night-time excursions beneath the floorboards in “Planchette” as they ‘race back and forth / like typewriters / across the lath and plaster’, uttering strange incantations
oh qwerty they clatter
oh qwerty qwerty
as the night grows hard around them
Appearing roughly halfway through A Day Like No Other, “Yippee” is the first prose poem in the book. This is a form which is found increasingly often, together with poems with longer and looser lines than is seen in the extracts quoted so far. There are elements of flash fiction in these poems and a surreal kind of humour is often present. “Yippee” begins
When the podiatrists escaped we immediately set up roadblocks. But they
were apparently wise to us and kept to the footpaths. Somewhat unfairly
too, they must have been wearing orthotics with rich crepe soles, which
allowed them, well after dark, to ripple right past our defences …
Norcliffe is good at sustaining this sort of absurdity. Repetition (e.g. of the word ‘podiatrist’) is here used mainly for comic effect; but in other instances like “Turbo prop job” and “Squeegee” the humour is undercut by hints of worryingly obsessive behaviour. Other prose poems, however, are more reflective and use repetition in gently balanced sentences.
The bus shelter across the way had seen better days; the railway station
would see no more. The first no longer hoped for as bus; the second had
abandoned hopes of a train.
(“The map-maker’s mistake”)
Norcliffe’s poetry is usually sympathetic towards humanity, with all its frailties as well as its capacity for love . His imagining of a man so lonely that ‘he pushed/ his card into the ATM/ not for the cash but/ for the conversation’ is poignant in spite of the implausibility. He shows a simpler and more artless human warmth when he writes about bereavement and
the note I will write later
to my old friend – a note as helpless as all
the messages we send to those who survive
who arrive at the end of the day to find
themselves alone and opening envelopes
(“Lost in Nineveh”)
The glorious foolishness of open-hearted love is captured in “Three times upon a time”
Three times upon a time she told me that she loved me.
The first time upon a time was in a lilac hedge under stars sprinkled
like talcum. Embraced by leaves we embraced each other and in that
embrace she murmured the words.
Alongside such gentle and essentially upbeat poems, however, there are others that descend into bleakness. The sequence “Villon in Millerton” imagines the fifteenth century French poet stranded in a run-down ex-mining community in New Zealand. Villon sees himself as
a weatherboard
a borrowed clapboard
banged on the side
of a clapped-out house
Oh God
before I become pluperfect
just pinchbar me
the hell out of here
This is a striking but very recognisable image of hopelessness and loss of purpose. But the final sections of the book include dark poems that are more enigmatic. One such is “The man who turned himself into a gun”. This makes compelling reading but, to me at least, it is like a parable lacking an interpretation:
He wanted to press himself
into evil’s shoulder, be cradled there
He wanted to be trained in evil’s grip,
evil’s telescopic sight in his sight
Equally ominous is “The museum of unnatural history” where ‘great, bare branches reach up struggling with // the memory of birds’. One thinks here of climate change and the loss of species. We can imagine the trees regretting the absence of the birds that once inhabited them and also see the trees themselves barely surviving in an environment altered by rising temperatures.
The book’s title poem “A day like no other” makes anxiety still more explicit. Its location seems to be both domestic and global, set amid ‘the swirl of the dust and the smoke of the past’. The threatening situation may be explained (in a way echoing earlier humorous prose poems) the presence of plumbers who ‘have brought jackhammers into the living room. They are large determined men. The pipes are not safe.’ But the problems are bigger than that: ‘Notre Dame is burning / Christchurch has a new meaning’. There is more than just a possibility of things becoming ‘completely unbearable’.
It is not surprising that a Selected Poems, drawn from work spanning nearly forty years, explores so many themes and uses so many different tones and styles . One could hardly expect to sum up James Norcliffe’s poetry in a few key words. Nevertheless, a word that does quite often occur in reviews is ‘playful’ – particularly in relation to his early and middle period work. The rats going ‘qwerty, qwerty’ in “Plancehette” and the escaped podiatrists in “Yippee” are examples which clearly justify that epithet. But such poems need not be simple or superficial. When children play they are experimenting with the world as they discover it; and Norcliffe’s poetry does something similar when he rearranges familiar objects and ideas into unexpected new relationships that are sometimes funny, sometimes alarming but nearly always thought-provoking. It is worth remembering that ‘playing’ is what virtuoso musicians do. They not only give their audience immediate pleasure but can also deliver something more subtle and profound beneath the surface appeal. The word ‘play’ also relates to what an actors does when embodying a character in a performance. Norcliffe is fond of drama – especially in film – and knows how to enhance a good story by using appropriate voices and styles. The stories he tells may be darker in his later collections than they were in his more overtly ‘playful’ era; but the intriguing and elegant products of his ingenious vision and imagination are here to be appreciated and enjoyed throughout this excellent book.
Sep 22 2026
London Grip Poetry Review – James Norcliffe
Poetry review – A DAY LIKE NO OTHER: Thomas Ovans considers a new and generous selection from James Norcliffe’s many collections
A Day Like No Other
James Norcliffe
Otago University Press
ISBN 9781991348166
176pp NZ445 UK£18.74
Writing in a London Grip review in 2016, Roger Caldwell observed that ‘James Norcliffe, the veteran New Zealand poet, deserves to be better-known in this country.’ We are pleased that this journal has on several occasions had a chance to bring his work to the notice of its readers — in 2012, 2020 and 2023. We now have a further opportunity as we consider A Day Like No Other which offers a new selection of Norcliffe’s poetry drawn from all ten of his collections since 1987.
A Day Like No Other includes a foreword by Erik Kennedy which outlines Norcliffe’s impressive career with its many achievements and awards. Kennedy also reminds us that, although Norcliffe comes from New Zealand (which might be seen as faraway and isolated), he has travelled widely – and indeed lived in other countries – and is in no way disengaged from world events, even the darkest ones. In a poem set during a visit to the Franz Josef glacier in New Zealand’s south island he writes
We hear Pol Pot has died again
but the reception is poor
the TV has cataracts double
vision and snow blindness
the heart of the glacier
is as hard cold and blue
as a carefully carried memory
ruthless and perfect
A later poem “The attack on Baghdad” responds to the Iraq war and the “Shock and Awe” bombing which began it. It describes the horrors indirectly
in the evening a rising wind
knocked the black peaches
from the laden branches
one by one they dropped
and some fell into the roses
where thorns tore at their flesh
Norcliffe looks at harsh truths in this oblique way not to soften them but rather to transform their ugliness to something so unexpected that it shocks us into seeing horror afresh. In a different tone, “How to dress for peace” suggests a fancifully radical way of escaping a cycle of violence. It gives gentle but firm instructions on removing all military equipment – from ammunition belt right down to underpants – so it can be replaced by ‘a long silk shift’ which is ‘white and has been/ neatly ironed’. Then, to complete the re-clothing, it points out
on the dresser
there is a small yellow harp
don’t leave without it
Norcliffe is also fond of tampering with reality when he writes about less momentous matters . Unrelated facts are combined to suggest fanciful conclusions:
the hardest soap
comes from Castile
the hardest steel
comes from Toledo
the Spanish must be
a soft good-tempered people
(“The true story of soap”)
Sometimes he goes further and puts real people or events in unlikely juxtapositions as in “Letters to Dr Dee from Fangshan” or “Villon in Millerton”. He also likes to view the world through the eyes of invented characters: his first collection includes a sequence about ‘the sportsman’ – a tightly focussed individual who ‘learned to avoid god/ as one who could probably/ knock his block off’ and who ‘did not tax god/ with awkward questions/ which would interfere/ with sport’. A later collection introduces the much less muscular ‘bookman’ who addresses his lover in ‘words that fall like water with/ the elegance of Garamond tracing// that fine line between anticipation/ and memory …’
Norcliffe’s poetry gives quite a lot of space to the earth’s many creatures which are not people –toads and frogs, sandflies and sea horses. A flock of turkey buzzards resembles ‘a scatter of iron filings but purposeful;/ black fillings in the mouth of the sky’. Rats (which evidently ‘like being tickled’) make mysterious night-time excursions beneath the floorboards in “Planchette” as they ‘race back and forth / like typewriters / across the lath and plaster’, uttering strange incantations
oh qwerty they clatter
oh qwerty qwerty
as the night grows hard around them
Appearing roughly halfway through A Day Like No Other, “Yippee” is the first prose poem in the book. This is a form which is found increasingly often, together with poems with longer and looser lines than is seen in the extracts quoted so far. There are elements of flash fiction in these poems and a surreal kind of humour is often present. “Yippee” begins
When the podiatrists escaped we immediately set up roadblocks. But they
were apparently wise to us and kept to the footpaths. Somewhat unfairly
too, they must have been wearing orthotics with rich crepe soles, which
allowed them, well after dark, to ripple right past our defences …
Norcliffe is good at sustaining this sort of absurdity. Repetition (e.g. of the word ‘podiatrist’) is here used mainly for comic effect; but in other instances like “Turbo prop job” and “Squeegee” the humour is undercut by hints of worryingly obsessive behaviour. Other prose poems, however, are more reflective and use repetition in gently balanced sentences.
The bus shelter across the way had seen better days; the railway station
would see no more. The first no longer hoped for as bus; the second had
abandoned hopes of a train.
(“The map-maker’s mistake”)
Norcliffe’s poetry is usually sympathetic towards humanity, with all its frailties as well as its capacity for love . His imagining of a man so lonely that ‘he pushed/ his card into the ATM/ not for the cash but/ for the conversation’ is poignant in spite of the implausibility. He shows a simpler and more artless human warmth when he writes about bereavement and
the note I will write later
to my old friend – a note as helpless as all
the messages we send to those who survive
who arrive at the end of the day to find
themselves alone and opening envelopes
(“Lost in Nineveh”)
The glorious foolishness of open-hearted love is captured in “Three times upon a time”
Three times upon a time she told me that she loved me.
The first time upon a time was in a lilac hedge under stars sprinkled
like talcum. Embraced by leaves we embraced each other and in that
embrace she murmured the words.
Alongside such gentle and essentially upbeat poems, however, there are others that descend into bleakness. The sequence “Villon in Millerton” imagines the fifteenth century French poet stranded in a run-down ex-mining community in New Zealand. Villon sees himself as
a weatherboard
a borrowed clapboard
banged on the side
of a clapped-out house
Oh God
before I become pluperfect
just pinchbar me
the hell out of here
This is a striking but very recognisable image of hopelessness and loss of purpose. But the final sections of the book include dark poems that are more enigmatic. One such is “The man who turned himself into a gun”. This makes compelling reading but, to me at least, it is like a parable lacking an interpretation:
He wanted to press himself
into evil’s shoulder, be cradled there
He wanted to be trained in evil’s grip,
evil’s telescopic sight in his sight
Equally ominous is “The museum of unnatural history” where ‘great, bare branches reach up struggling with // the memory of birds’. One thinks here of climate change and the loss of species. We can imagine the trees regretting the absence of the birds that once inhabited them and also see the trees themselves barely surviving in an environment altered by rising temperatures.
The book’s title poem “A day like no other” makes anxiety still more explicit. Its location seems to be both domestic and global, set amid ‘the swirl of the dust and the smoke of the past’. The threatening situation may be explained (in a way echoing earlier humorous prose poems) the presence of plumbers who ‘have brought jackhammers into the living room. They are large determined men. The pipes are not safe.’ But the problems are bigger than that: ‘Notre Dame is burning / Christchurch has a new meaning’. There is more than just a possibility of things becoming ‘completely unbearable’.
It is not surprising that a Selected Poems, drawn from work spanning nearly forty years, explores so many themes and uses so many different tones and styles . One could hardly expect to sum up James Norcliffe’s poetry in a few key words. Nevertheless, a word that does quite often occur in reviews is ‘playful’ – particularly in relation to his early and middle period work. The rats going ‘qwerty, qwerty’ in “Plancehette” and the escaped podiatrists in “Yippee” are examples which clearly justify that epithet. But such poems need not be simple or superficial. When children play they are experimenting with the world as they discover it; and Norcliffe’s poetry does something similar when he rearranges familiar objects and ideas into unexpected new relationships that are sometimes funny, sometimes alarming but nearly always thought-provoking. It is worth remembering that ‘playing’ is what virtuoso musicians do. They not only give their audience immediate pleasure but can also deliver something more subtle and profound beneath the surface appeal. The word ‘play’ also relates to what an actors does when embodying a character in a performance. Norcliffe is fond of drama – especially in film – and knows how to enhance a good story by using appropriate voices and styles. The stories he tells may be darker in his later collections than they were in his more overtly ‘playful’ era; but the intriguing and elegant products of his ingenious vision and imagination are here to be appreciated and enjoyed throughout this excellent book.