New Zealand Poetry Society Te Hunga Tito Ruri o Aotearoa
Stead: Collected Poems Review Part 2
Collected Poems 1951-2006 C.K. Stead (AUP, 2008) RRP $60 ISBN 978-1-86940-418-5
Laurice Gilbert
I ran out of time and room when I started this review (a fine line, January 2009), and overlooked the final poem from Walking Westward (1979), ‘Uta’. Subtitled ‘from the Japanese’, it’s a charming and wistful tanka sequence. Stead describes it in his notes as, “ The original fifty poems from Walking Westward … culled, revised and rearranged here into the semblance of a narrative.” It works well on its own terms, from its opening stanza:
First light
flickers
in the east
and we fumble
to dress each other.
through great love:
People
in this towered city
abound.
My heart has
one inhabitant.
and into separation. In true romance fashion the lover goes on a journey, seasons pass, the separation is long and unbearable, the suspense unremitting:
A sword
at my throat
I felt in my dream
An omen?
Will there be no return?
But all is well in the end:
By the stone store
dependable pine
when I stare at you
one long gone
stares back.
Summer mountains
my lover
crosses
and louder
the cuckoo sings.
The stanzas read for all purposes like translations, indicating how thoroughly Stead entered the spirit of the Japanese form. It strikes me as a true testament to his creativity (as if one were needed!), given that he knew no Japanese and constructed it using “scholars’ … transliterations, notes, grammars and glossaries”.
Geographies (1982) extends what began in Walking Westward – long poems, narratives, and experimentation with form, shape, and frequent interruptions for quotations. The first half is a rich and absorbing read, and demands a longer attention span than I can usually find these days. After the long poems the works become more conventional in form, with smaller narratives that threaten to be too tight after all that rambling, but which get away with it. From ‘A Warm Wind from the East Frank Sargeson’:
… there’s cheese in the fridge
tea in the caddy he cooks
himself vegetables and fish a
corner of the garden’s good for
tomatoes the best anecdotes
still surface and whatever
the losses they don’t include a
wicked eye nor a good loud laugh.
Selections from Poems of a Decade (1983) consists of four short poems: ‘The Plum Tree” a sort of ‘
3
…
Give me your Picassos, donne-moi tous tes Matisses,
let me address the boulevards, allow me to pacify the Metro,
permit me to lay a blessing over the buttresses of Notre Dame
and stand the
This is my day,
7
...
It is because we’re all to die that we visit
not that we want salvation or think eternity possible
or believe more fervently in God than in the bathroom
…
but that this is an arcane language we can turn an ear to
as to the thrush on a wet evening, knowing more or less
its import without understanding…
9
Poems have been written on roof-slates, starlings
are drinking diamonds, the webs between the branches
have been renewed this early winter morning
as the cabs encircle once more the Place de la Concorde.
and the rain has gone leaving an unutterable sky…
Delicious.
On to Between (1988), and the poems become both personal and political. The 1981 Springbok Tour gets a look in, as do Bastion Point and the Rainbow Warrior. There’s more of
The tomb of the unknown soldier, le tombeau
du soldat inconnu —
nameless in a check shirt, there’s no tomb for him.
In a million stills he flinched from the levelled revolver
of the chief of police. Last night on television
he died again, falling back in a sitting posture.
then toppling sideways spilling blood on the street.
He’s been dying like that for more than a decade…
In fact there’s quite a lot about death. From ‘Goodbye’: “The dead don’t write/ poetry have no need of/ it no matter who// it was spoke through…” In ‘The Poetry Room’ the first of 6 sections is titled ‘Carpe Diem’ (“…Will it be loud / as we rush to the last implosion? Will it be long?”), but it finishes cheerily enough:
6 The Poetry Room
The poetry room has no doors and they’re all open.
You can’t get in by applying or asking for a ticket
but once inside everything’s as it should be. Marvellous.
And you never open a book. Remember that character
in a French novel who thought so much of
he never went there — just dined on beef at
How could real
The poetry room’s like that. You walk home whistling.
Indeed.
Voices (1990) is a formal set of poems, commissioned for the 1990 celebrations of the 150th anniversary of the Treaty of Waitangi. While not the usual Stead mix of free verse and structure, they work very well as a historical journey. As the title suggests, they take the form of different voices, so the occasion(s) of the Treaty-signing itself is covered by The Girl, The Printer, The Settler, The Chief and The Governor, who, a little impatiently, reports,
…
These
I must curb them, and block the French, or we may lose
our foothold. I cannot wait for more to sign:
the Treaty as it stands must suit our purpose.
Tonight we have drafted formal proclamations
claiming
as ceded by the Treaty: the rest by Discovery.
from: 21 May The Governor
World War I is passed over briefly, and WWII receives a section all to itself. All of it is moving, the last poem (1945 The Explanation) heartbreaking:
I try to give them the scene:
our troops moving to attack, the flash and thud of a mine
and their son horribly wounded. “Finish it, Major,”
he says in pain — the worst moment of my life.
Those mines were ours and laid without my orders.
…
We relive the 1951 waterfront strike, the 1953 visit of the new Queen, with its associated tragedy, Peter Snell at the Rome Olympics, the death of Norman Kirk, and revisit the Rainbow Warrior. It’s not Michael King’s History, but it’s a worthy companion. And of course it finishes in 1990, with a marginally cheesy but inclusive summing up:
Let today be all the days we’ve lived in
stench of whale meat, a rat cooked on a spit,
morning boots frozen hard, the southern Maori
ravaged by measles, rum, Te Rauparaha;
wars in the north, gumfields, forests falling
to ruminant grassland, cities climbing like trees;
and everywhere this language both supple and strong.
You didn’t start it, Governor. As we do, you fashioned
what time, and the times that live in us, required.
It doesn’t finish, The verses have no end.
from: 1990 At the Grave of Governor Hobson
After that, the return to personal poetry, in selections from Straw into Gold: Poems New and Selected (1997) is a bit of a paradigm shift. A trip to
6 Rupert Brooke (1887-1915)
Just think if he’d died
in Aotearoa
rather than in
his ‘corner of a foreign field
that is forever
would have been right here —
in the
or Taranaki —
a clear breach of the Treaty!
He passed through in 1913
on his way to
it was that close!
With The Right Thing (2000), it feels as though we’re getting into modern Stead, though the familiar voice remains steady. The ‘Cartoons’ in particular have a post-modern sensibility that speaks of reading the paper and shaking your head in wonderment at the follies of mankind. There are more literary allusions, as is the way of the educated poet, and Catullus continues to make his presence felt.
He hasn’t lost his liking for sequences, and ‘Nine Nines’ combines travel, personal reminiscences and philosophy in (inevitably) 9 poems of 9 lines each. There is a rhythm about it that I particularly like, despite the variation in themes, and the work as a whole is perhaps summed up in:
4 Zen
Must poems have always the extravagance
of Death or Love? Nine lives might not be enough
even for the cat sleeping in the almost silence
of a distant handsaw’s panting. Blue sky, green trees,
white weatherboards, a garden full of washing
all arms and legs, cram full the breathless moment.
Nothing to be gained by running at it headlong.
Answer the Master. Tell him what the World saw
when the thrush flew down from the pear tree.
Dog (2002) continues the sequence style, with ‘
It also includes a rather lovely elegy to a cat, which I confess as an animal lover I cannot resist quoting:
…
Zac of the goldfish eyes
and nice-smelling fur
who when I had a problem with a poem
slept on it,
who lived to put his paw-print
on a valued citation,
who in his dying days
jumped to swipe at a passing moth
and missed.
from: ‘Cat/ullus’
There’s lots more in this book, but this is the first of the Collection in which truly concrete poems appear. There’s a poem about
The Red Tram (2004): more stories, more sequences, more voices, more literary allusions. I don’t mean that is more of the same – the originality is unquestioned – but working through a 520 page collection, covering so many years, so much output, is a mammoth task, and I think I’m getting tired (and more than a little jealous). Nevertheless, I’m going to share a little bit more before we reach the end.
‘The Advance of English – Lang and Lit’ is a parody poem, a genre I generally enjoy for its cleverness (and in which Wendy Cope is my guru). In this case it’s summaries:
3 Wordsworth – ‘Tintern Abbey’
I used to come
here as a kid.
Sometimes my sister came too.
It was nice.
There was the river,
and the rocks for climbing.
You miss those things, don’t you
as you get older.
There are many poems here that could only be written in New Zealand, which is something I really like, and others that emphasise Stead’s playful side (‘How to Rhyme in 2003’).
The final book in the Collected Works is The Black River (2007), the book that issued from Stead’s 2005 stroke, and which was more than adequately reviewed in this publication by Jessica Le Bas (May 2007).
The final section, though, is a group called ‘Some Early Uncollected Poems 1951-61’. Some of them are unpublished; most of them were in periodicals of one sort or another. Being from an earlier incarnation of the poet’s oeuvre, they’re mainly of historical and archival interest, and many strike me as a bit overblown, compared to the later works I’ve been reading. However, I do like the opening lines of ‘Choruses’ (1957), from a translation of Euripides’ Alcestis, by Iain Lonie and CK Stead.
I
I have led my five senses like hungry children
Into the world of poems, and there fed them.
I have shot my spirit like an arrow into the heavens,
For it knows no satisfaction in the life of things.
I have plunged my mind into the clear well of science
Like a dry sponge, hungering to cool my brow
Yet I know no power great as necessity
As a summary of the life-long work of one of
Phew.
