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Graham Brazier – Friend (words by Hone Tuwhare)
From Tuwhare [Buy]

Hone Tuwhare with Prime Minister Helen Clark in 2003

It seems that everyone back home is worried about a summer shark epidemic, and meanwhile New Zealand is losing all its national treasures at once – last week it was Sir Ed, this week it’s Hone Tuwhare, (1922-2008) one of our most eminent poets.

It’s interesting to notice that Tuwhare’s life spanned the full stretch of our islands: a Ngapuhi son born in Kaikohe in the north of the North Island, he spent his final years in the remote deep south of the Catlins. Tuwhare’s poems always seem to me to place humans and their emotions at their centre, playing out stories of family and relationships in a landscape that could only be New Zealand.

In 2005 a collection of New Zealand musicians set some of Tuwhare’s poems to music, released on the album Tuwhare. Graham Brazier‘s acoustic version of Friend is a good example. It’s interesting to compare Brazier’s version to the natural, unaffected way Hone Tuwhare himself reads the poem (starting at 1’27 in the video below).