{"id":6064,"date":"2024-03-28T12:47:25","date_gmt":"2024-03-28T02:17:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/?p=6064"},"modified":"2024-08-07T12:49:09","modified_gmt":"2024-08-07T02:19:09","slug":"poetry-spotlight-good-friday-by-steve-brock","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/2024\/03\/poetry-spotlight-good-friday-by-steve-brock\/","title":{"rendered":"POETRY SPOTLIGHT: ‘Good Friday’ by Steve Brock"},"content":{"rendered":"

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This week’s poetry spotlight shines on Steve Brock’s Live at Mr Jake’s<\/em><\/a>, highlighting the poem ‘Good Friday’. <\/b><\/p>\n

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Post written by Polly Grant Butler<\/pre>\n
The Thursday before Good Friday is always a rush if you manage to remember that the stores will be closed tomorrow. My first job as a teenager was in a deli at a supermarket, and I remember one year calling up to try to cancel my Thursday-before-Good-Friday shift as I had awoken that day with tonsillitis. They said no, I had to come in, because it was the busiest day of the year, particularly for the seafood department. I didn’t know about any of this, coming from a family who had basically ignored Easter once hunting for eggs had lost its shine. So I went in, repeating the words \u2018Anything else?\u2019 over and over as I shoveled prawns into plastic bags, their spiky bodies slicing my hands through cheap thin gloves, my infected throat, my voice which had soon become a whisper.<\/p>\n
To be sick on a long weekend is never ideal, the choice between paying an exorbitant amount to see a doctor or, depending on the severity of your illness, waiting hours in a hospital waiting room among the revelers and casualties of the weekend. The speaker in Steve Brock\u2019s \u2018Good Friday\u2019 faces this problem, biting into a chocolate egg and being rewarded with a toothache. Deterred by the only available dentist\u2019s excessive fees, his pain turns to pleasure as he is informed by the news that pubs will now be serving alcohol on Good Friday.<\/p>\n
Last night, trying to procrastinate from my own poetry writing, I reread \u2018Tradition and the Individual Talent\u2019 by T.S. Eliot. In it he writes, \u2018It is not in his personal emotions, the emotions provoked by particular events in his life, that the poet is in any way remarkable or interesting. His particular emotions may be simple, or crude, or flat. \u2026 The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.\u2019 This is a nice way of construing poets like Steve, who perfectly capture these small slices of life, bringing objects and characters alive to create poems that feel like an escape, a story.<\/p>\n
Happy Easter, and if you\u2019re reading this on Friday, I hope you remembered to do your shopping. If not, there might be a pub open.<\/p>\n\n\n
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This week’s poetry spotlight shines on Steve Brock’s Live at Mr Jake’s, highlighting the poem ‘Good Friday’. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[792,80,315,855,8],"tags":[864,856,46,862,858],"class_list":["post-6064","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-australian","category-for-fun","category-poetry-2","category-poetry-spotlight","category-we-love-books","tag-australian-poetry","tag-poems","tag-poetry","tag-poetry-spotlight","tag-poets"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4v1Of-1zO","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6064","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6064"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6064\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6275,"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6064\/revisions\/6275"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6064"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6064"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6064"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}