Friday Prayers

FRIDAY PRAYERS is a chapbook of five poems from Tony Beyer whose ANCHOR STONE was a finalist in the 2018 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. 'Island time' is a meditation on impermanence and identity ( we who so loved the world / are its destroyers') while the title poem in the aftermath of the Christchurch mosque killings considers complicity & is followed by 'Crusade' an account of a rugby match between the Chiefs & the Crusaders. Tony Beyer has never followed signposts; he has always attended to the road rewarding us with a considered prosody that honours the moment yet goes beyond it. His language is disciplined almost ascetic but there is a generosity in even the most clipped line a kind of 'elated patience' that is rare and all the more welcome for its rarity in New Zealand poetry. -David Howard.