An assured debut poetry collection that playfully honours and subverts the lyric tradition.

Funerals happen.
You walk past one
and call it a Tuesday

afternoon; the sun
comes down. This
is how it happens.

A crowd gathers like black water, the mind forgets the mind, memories come knocking in the hallway, a pair of hands perfect the moon: Portrait is the darkly lucid debut poetry collection by Jackson McCarthy. Desire, time, vision, beauty, and solitude count among this collection’s obsessions — obsessions rendered with such close-up intensity that even Death seems to reverse or suspend its trajectory. Interrupting this lyrical streak, we hear from a narrator whose tragicomic dedication to art over life results in fraught, surreal misunderstandings of the world around him. Portrait, too, is invested in its own artfulness. Playing with layers of voice and identity, these poems appear to paint portraits of their subjects — but do so blending observation with invention, memory with deep fantasy.

Author

Jackson McCarthy is a poet based in Te-Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington. He is of Lebanese, Māori, and Pākehā descent. His poetry has been published widely in Aotearoa literary journals, including Landfall Tauraka, Ōrongohau | Best New Zealand Poems, The Spinoff, Starling, and Sweet Mammalian. Portrait is his first book.

Endorsements

‘McCarthy’s poems are intelligent and musical, unsentimental and gritty yet utterly, gloriously romantic. There is a freshness to Portrait, a kind of fluid clarity washing through like an eye bath; even its melancholy — and there’s plenty of it — feels salutary. A beautiful logbook of life in the present moment.’
— Kate Camp

‘Portrait begins with an interest in disembodied voices — neurotic fathers, sentient programme notes, boys in bedrooms — that finely balances charm, eroticism, frankness, and beauty. But its final thrust brings us into a glittering, heavy lyricism of an almost metaphysical curiosity: why, in a world of shocking violence, do we sing “these songs of loss” at all? This is a dizzying and serious debut in which McCarthy stakes out his position as one of the finest lyricists of my generation.’
— Cadence Chung

‘Jackson McCarthy is an extraordinary talent whose poetry is at once absolutely of its time and knowingly part of a long tradition of lyric poetry. Vulnerability, beauty, and emotional intensity are time-honoured lyric qualities, as are the equally contemporary obsessions with death, nostalgia, memory, and the body — but no other poet brings all these aspects of the lyric together with quite the combination of control and passion, reverence and originality, seriousness and irony that McCarthy achieves in this quietly spectacular collection.’
— Anna Jackson

‘Jackson McCarthy reflects on how we create and revise our own personal histories, while questioning the reliability of memory and art to represent the past. Strange and riveting, Portrait is a sophisticated and impressive debut infused with nostalgia and longing that establishes Jackson as one of the most promising poets of his generation.’
— Chris Tse