Sue Wootton
… Now we insert the point
of an elevator in the peridontal space.”– from “A Patient” by Alan Roddick.
There are not many poets who can confidently use the phrase ‘peridontal space’ in a poem. Indeed, I know only one: dentist poet Alan Roddick, whose long awaited second collection, Getting it Right, has just appeared. It follows at a stately remove from its predecessor, The Eye Corrects, which was published in 1967. The poems collected in Getting it Right feel honed, polished, clear. They celebrate the natural world, love and life (there is only the one poem which overtly mentions dentistry, so dentophobics need not fear opening the book), and Roddick brings his steady eye and hand to every line.
Simples
For bee-stings, a Blue Bag,
cool from the laundry.
The sting gone, the sting went.
ii
By each nettle-bed
a dock-leaf bandage.
For every dock plant,
stinging nettles
taught me some shortcuts
follow the field path.
Milk of Magnesia
from its blue glass bottle,
a brim-full teaspoon:
after seventy years
my throat again gulps closed.
iv
For each black eye
somehow the pantry
had steak to spare.
Woodward’s Gripe Water:
when my sisters were teething
I’d line up with my spoon
to beg one last mouthful
of ginger, dill, fennel,
and chamomile –
tasty medicinal words!
vi
A cool hand
to read hot foreheads.
A sharp eye
for what’s wrong, or not.
An ear awake
to worry in the dark.
Alan Roddick has retired from a dentistry career in general practice and public health. He served on the State Literary Fund Advisory Committee, presented the National Radio programme, Poetry, and wrote a monograph on Allan Curnow for Oxford University Press. He was the editor of the New Zealand Dental Journal for four years, and since 1973 has been Charles Brasch’s literary executor. Alan lives in Dunedin, New Zealand.
Getting it Right is published by Otago University Press.
Sue Wootton is co-editor of Corpus.