Collected Poems 1951-2006 C.K. Stead (AUP, 2008) RRP $60 ISBN 978-1-86940-418-5

Laurice Gilbert

A collection that covers 55 years and 519 pages of poetry (plus another 14 pp of notes and a 9-page  index of first lines) is not really amenable to the usual form of review. I freely confess I haven’t read it all – that’s going to take me a while – and most of the components will have been reviewed at the time of publication anyway. The best I can do for now is start the process, and continue in a future issue of a fine line, when I have time to get into it a bit further.

            I believe this is one of the most important records of a New Zealand poet we have, and it deserves a place in the NZ Poetry Society library, along with the Collected Works of James K. Baxter (which I’m still looking for at an affordable price). What this book does in a comprehensive way is to plot the development of Stead the Poet. He is, of course, a great deal more than that, and the list of awards and honours takes up most of the back flap, culminating in our highest honour, the Order of New Zealand.

            The collection opens with the 1964 publication Whether the Will is Free: Poems 1954-62,  works its way through the ensuing 13 poetry collections up to and including The Black River (2007), and finishes with ‘Some Early Uncollected Poems, 1951-1961’, which he allowed himself to revise, “to dress them better and tidy their hair”.

            Early Stead was in the main formal and structured, dealing with the traditional themes, as in ‘Carpe Diem’:

 

Since Juliet’s on ice, and Joan

Staked her chips on a high throne

 

Sing a waste of dreams that are

Caressing, moist, familiar;

…

Love keeps a cuckoo on his clock

And death’s the hammer makes the stroke.

            from, Whether the Will is Free: Poems 1954-62

 

            I particularly enjoyed sampling the second book, Crossing the Bar (1972), as the poems were more personal, more narrative, yet with no shortage of topical allusions. ‘A Small Registry of Births and Deaths’, chronicles the birth of a child:

 

All night it bullied you.

When it shook you hard enough

They took you away.

I was shaken too. I walked

The frantic corridor praying

Representing

My terror so minutely

It went unnoticed.

 

Later in the same poem:

 

Six months ago a free bomb fell on a school.

Forty-five children were changed.

They became a job for the cleaners.

…

 

Lyndon, if ever a missile

Blows one of your Birds to bits

Don’t hate it, Lyndon —

It was only misguided.

It wanted to make you free.

Take heart that in Detroit

Every three seconds

A car is born.

 

That the President in charge was Lyndon B. Johnson, and not George W. Bush, merely reinforces the timelessness of the poet’s concern for the future of his children.

            Quesada: Poems 1972-74 was Stead’s own experiment at self-publishing, partly as a result of six months in Menton, France, and it won the first ever New Zealand Book Award for Poetry. We should all be so lucky. It’s shorter, almost chapbook length, but most of the poems are longer ones. ‘The Swan’  was an attempt at translation of Baudelaire’s’ Le Cygne’ while maintaining the formal rhyme scheme, and, paradoxically, is the only visually constrained poem in a collection that establishes a more relaxed approach to structure.

            By 1979 (Walking Westward) Stead has lightened up enough to include humour before settling in to the ‘Twenty-two Sonnets’:

 

Ode

 

A Shelley

held to the ear —

listen! It’s

the west wind.

 

and:

 

‘Now is the month of maying…’

 

The sky has gone dead.

The park crunches underfoot.

The English trees are going to pieces again.

            from, ‘Breaking the Neck: an Autumn Sketchbook’

 

            The Sonnets embrace the period from Spring 1974 (the death of Norman Kirk) to Autumn 1978 (post-Bastion Point), and are intensely personal, frequently referring to friends and acquaintances now dead. These are some of my favourite Stead poems, for their profound simplicity, and for the compassion they inspire. From Sonnet 2:

 

… that morning four-year-old Michele Fox

Sat at our table painting shapes she said were flowers

 

When we listened to the news: a coaster missing up North,

…

 

                                    … I kept that painting —

 

It was the world she saw believing she had a father.

He was a third engineer, A Scotsman, a good neighbour lost.

 

            “Spring is a recurring astonishment, like poetry” opens Sonnet 9, a reflection on the poet’s forty-second birthday, when a visit from a young man who was jailed for refusing the US draft echoes the birthday gift of Solzhenitsyn’s “The Gulag Archipelago”. It finishes with:

 

                                    … The quarrel of sparrows

Fills the silence of God that has lasted for forty-two years.

 

            The title poem has a touch of ‘The Wasteland’ to it, containing as it does multiple literary allusions, personal stories, topical references and even Venn diagrams. It deserves much closer examination than I have been able to give it so far.

            And so it goes on. There’s more, but I’ve run up against my own deadline.  Watch this space.

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