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| Geoff Cochrane | |
New Zealand poet and fiction writer Geoff Cochrane, "whose sudden loss is immense to our literary landscape and to the people who knew and loved him," died recently, the Spinoff Review of Books reported. He was 71. Cochrane published 22 books. In 2009, he was awarded the Janet Frame Prize for Poetry (2009), the inaugural Nigel Cox Unity Books Award (2010), and in 2014 was made an Arts Laureate.
Kirsten McDougall, writer and former publicist at Victoria University Press (now Te Herenga Waka University Press), Cochrane's publisher, observed: "He always liked to call me that--'my publicist.' Though it was hard getting Geoff any publicity for his perfectly chiseled slim volumes. He wasn't a hot young thing or a venerated old thing; his work was widely ignored by those who give out prizes and seats at festivals. But he was always so grateful for anything I did for him....
"In 2014, the Arts Foundation awarded Geoff a laureate. For someone on a benefit in a council flat, the A$50k [about US$33,840] that came with it was a veritable jackpot. I accompanied Geoff to Auckland along with his publisher ('my publisher'), Fergus Barrowman. On stage he looked like an ancient jockey, tiny in his brand new Farmers straight leg jeans, beanie, polar fleece and Bata Bullets, but still quick as a whip. He wrote in a letter to me that year: 'I've always felt that I stood at the end of too long a queue ever to get my turn. But what could be sweeter than being able to call oneself a laureate?' "
From Cochrane's poem "Channel Hopping":
I'm young in my dreams, still young,
and I still have some ink in my pen,
but one repents of wanting to be known.
Writer Anne Kennedy recalled that "I don't fear death, but I do fear cremation" were the last words in Cochrane's final book, Chosen. "Angular, funny, a bit scary--actually, freeze-your-blood scary. That was Geoff, his life and work. The lines keep coming, as they always will: His high, almost-romantic rhetoric, as in his iconic The Sea the Landsman Knows--'that dark heave of menace/ You pilot your sleeping skipper through.' His essence-of-people--'How do spell psychosis? he might ask' (Robin). His Wellington; he so loved Wellington and showed it to us--Lambton Quay is 'an edifice packed with architectural clout/ of a scrolly, antique kind' (Things are not as they were)."
On Cochrane's death, New Zealand poet laureate Chris Tse wrote "Starship (version)" in tribute to him:
Geoff is dead
but some of us remain--some might say stranded, some might say perched
in the life-long queue to transfer to
whatever comes next. There's Geoff--speeding now
towards a reunion with Gareth and Chris and Peter.And here--little bits of him on our shelves
and in the curious corners of our brains
where snatches of his lines rewrite themselves
until they are synapse and nerve.Time grants us intervals--we jerk between
learning to be present and knowing presence
is too soft to last forever. Survival is
not allowing either to consume you."How far I've come.
How far I've been alive."