Title: When God Died

Author: Michael Hulse

In: Sport 8: Autumn 1992

Publication details: Fergus Barrowman, March 1992, Wellington

Part of: Sport

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Sport 8: Autumn 1992

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The simplicity and justice of this are breathtaking. Jenny Bornholdt sometimes manages a similar simplicity, but hers is a simplicity that comes fresh, without the weight of deliberation that is in O'Brien's. That is why Waiting Shelter is such a captivating book: the voice is a straight one, sophisticated but natural, streetwise at times but never sly. The long title poem is about (no need for inverted commas) the quest for an emotional home, for the heart's accommodation. It is an observant, unforced, open poem, occasionally funny; and elsewhere in the book Bornholdt is very funny. But the one poem that seems to me to sum up the best in the page 137 collection—all that is warily warm-hearted, defensively engaging, and shrewdly naive—must be a self-effacing piece titled 'The Visit':