Review: Steal Away Boy: Selected poems of David Mitchell

Abstract

In 1985, out of a job and mouths to feed I was offered a reprieve by Jim Tully, then an editor at the Auckland Star, who suggested that I might work as a proof-reader at the newspaper. David Mitchell was one of my workmates. We exchanged few words, though we were acquainted with each other. Having read the editor’s introduction to Steal Away Boy: Selected poems of David Mitchell, I can see that he had begun a retreat into silence, into the kind of strategic withholding of self which appears to have characterised his relationship with editors who sought to pin his poems sprawling to some page or other. In this respect, Edmond and Roberts have done a superb job in enticing Mitchell out of the tomb.