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Overview
This collection of poetry culls Karl Stead’s most lasting and memorable works into a single volume. Drawn from previously published works though his distinguished career, from his debut collection Whether the Will is Free to his recent publication The Black River, this resource also contains 22 previously unpublished poems from his early days.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781775580478 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Auckland University Press |
| Publication date: | 01/01/2009 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 500 |
| File size: | 821 KB |
About the Author
C. K. Stead is a writer, a teacher, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He has written more than 13 novels, two collections of short stories, and 14 books of poetry. His work has been featured in numerous publications, including Classic New Zealand Poets in Performance and Speaking Voices.
Read an Excerpt
Collected Poems 1951â"2006
By C. K. Stead
Auckland University Press
Copyright © 2008 C. K. SteadAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-77558-047-8
CHAPTER 1
And could he now ...
And could he now go back? – to the milky mornings
Waking to Daisy's bell, a dance of dogs,
And the nipping early air in a yard all mud;
Summer mirrored on the dam, the cut scrub burning,
The gorse bright yellow until the time for logs –
Then damp days heavy with the axe's thud.
Rabbit or hawk in trap on moon full nights
By water glistening, and under hanging trees
The creeping quiet where loony Stanley crooned;
Go back to the long kitchen, candle for light,
Moreporks at brass bed time, and the mason bees
Stuffing the ears of the house with their waxy drone.
Leather and horse smell, smell of privy and pine,
And the muddy matron sow with her snouts of squeals
Escaping, jolting through scrub that climbed the hill.
But not the ash-white roads nor clacking lines
That led the boy, counting on flying wheels,
Can find him these, where time is quick to kill.
Trapped Rabbit
When the rabbit rattled the drag of a grasping trap,
Ran a few steps, laid back the flaps
Of ears against quivering fur, then seemed to play,
Lifting a twitching face that grinned and prayed;
When it tripped and ran to the tune of the wind-singing fence,
Stepping light-footed in exquisite, nervous dance
On the knife-edge knowledge of death; then heard our steps,
Its graceful frenzy bound in the weight of the trap
Collapsing clenched against steel and the waiting earth;
O when the hands made hard by the cycle of birth
And pain, closed on the warm-furred neck, and the bone
Clicked crisp in crystal air, the small stone
Of the head drooping towards earth as though
To burrow in shame from the blue
Of a sky that could only smile: then I felt
Neither guilt nor superfluous pity, but smelt
Clay at my heels, manuka breath
In clean air, denying this shapeless death.
Elements
i Iron Gully
Sky is hard in which the hawk hangs fire,
Rocks unflinching under imperious sun;
Water avoids this place, and leaf, and man
Pitched softer than its shrilling silences.
Praise here the forge and metal of the will,
Tenacious thorn, hawk dropping to kill,
Stone unmerged in stone, where all things know
It is the rain that softens us to love.
ii The Garden
From remembered rain beating a small dense garden
Nothing divides me. Not distance, nor the years that harden
Mind's clay and the mould of the face, can alter those small
Worm-wristed lilac-branches beside an ivied wall.
Heavy, flat down the rain comes, and is taken
Still by the mothering grass ignorant of time.
The leaves of the lemon tree wax, each separately shaken,
And enclosing stone stands firm, too tall to climb.
Dissolution
Street lights are marbling designs on the rain-glazed eye,
Shadows sprawling beyond wet hedges
Where charcoal trees sketch rough-and-ready edges
On the smudged grey backdrop of a winter-waking sky.
Sight blurred by rain, nerves on the soothing spools
Of its spinning sound; voices trapped beneath eaves;
Grass sighing underfoot and aging leaves
Soaking their wrinkles out in reflective pools.
This is the season's collapse, the dead-pan sky
Weeping of age to listless, listening trees,
Houses winking through blinds with the light that sees
Peace in the closing of summer's assertive eye.
So cooling sense dissolves across the brain
Spinning this winter mesh of drifting rain.
Night Watch in the Tararuas
Moon bathes the land in death, throws shadows down
From thorn and manuka over the stunted ground;
A gravel stream rasps smooth the butts of stone,
Moulds pebbles, waters sheep ragged as the land.
Rabbits thump their warnings through earth hard
As the carved gleam of Holdsworth against the sky
Whose upright, white-capped miles catch the moon's eye.
Placed now alone I shape for you the word –
Mind's genesis that would create you here
And make this place an Eden where the blurred
Shades of my lives resolve to one, and where
Art is the vision our conjunction yields.
So duty holds me, but commanding love,
Itself a discipline, is free to move.
And watching the ghosts of sheep in scrubby fields
Prisoned by walls of stone war-prisoners built
I know myself more bound by what love yields
Than by the laws that thought as often flouts
As hand obeys; so seem a slave to commands
I least respect, while yet all thought walks free
Into your greater serfdom, binding me.
For even here where beauty's large demands
Are met in thorn, unsentimental stone –
The cracking earthen bowl of a coarse-grained land –
Man's common fall impels the gentler vision.
Disease at the rugged root of Adam's tree
Restores green sensual time whose fertile dream
Makes clear the valley's hard, contrasting theme.
Here I recall night's fall to crumpled day,
Soft folds of morning under your sleeping face,
Mouth curved on memory, the opening eye
Holding a dream too full for the timid grace
Of innocence, yet waking to the toils of thought –
Blind disarray in slatted lines of light
Groping for truths that fade in day's dull sight.
No death more urgent than that waking, yet
In rock and thorn, night-settled dust, a land
Watered by one uncertain stream that's fed
From the white, religious mountain, I understand
The choice we make binding ourselves to love;
And know that though death breeds in love's strange bones
Its fading flesh lives warmer than the stone.
While down the fleeces of our sky ...
Our glassed-in shell is busy trapping sun.
My work is done: matting covers the boards,
Books and our pottery dishes upright in
Their standing frames of smooth-grained furniture.
Cushions have captured cocks of strutting red –
A low divan suggests you fall among them:
Composite image of bright concupiscence.
Beyond the wax of pumpkins, peppers drying,
Summer fruit and pohutukawa leaves,
A ship sails out, islands sprawl in the sun.
Close in our white blades knife a harmless breeze,
Children brawl, the Gulf winks and beckons,
While down the fleeces of our sky blue signals ride
From far dark worlds where it is always raining.
Letter to R. R. Dyer
Wave lifts; late-angled sunlight frames
Far out its white collapse whose sound
Rolls shoreward in its own good time.
That big surf breaking – noisy, blind
Sculptor mad with the work in hand –
Out of his own, is on my mind.
So the wind inflates the truth.
Old Duncan in the flat next door
Sees his dead son in each brown youth.
So, I suppose, I hoped the sea
Might beat and on my thoughts confer
Its eloquent tenacity.
The world rolls on the brink of fire,
Children play games, we play our own.
Full of ourselves, we both aspire
To write – most often write a lie.
I share this beach-oblivion;
You find tall truths in short supply.
A storm is brewing, but all day
Children on the brazen sand
Have gulled sharp cries along the bay.
Picnics, bodies barely made,
Lovers spanning time on hand,
Ebbed and flowed between the shade.
The houses here were pioneers' –
Those gentle-tough who never knew
A writer's cramp. The buttered years
Feed leisure uselessly unless
We make their language fit this view,
This beach that is our new address.
Is there a truth concealed in granite
Bitten by a mad-dog surf?
It won't be told by chance or habit –
Our borrowed styles are antique swords.
One sea is difficult enough,
But snow confounds our Christmas cards.
And now a head Del Sarto drew
Out of his time and place, distracts.
Irrelevant? It's in my view!
I set that sure and casual eye
In judgement on us, Rob, who lack
The means to speak so candidly.
But you have chosen Greece, alone,
While I, a husband grateful where
Your blessings on us both have shone,
Watch from this shell the breeding storm
And trust that love outlasts our fears
When ocean's ominous winds are born.
Three Imperatives in White
i
Walk, girl, the dead sand
Barefoot. Your body bends
To skirt the wind,
And the leaf of your hand
Blows from your flying hair.
ii
Climb moon, the grave sky,
Sail easy there
Darkly shading
Your full face, riding
A path splashed down on the sea.
iii
White trunks, resist
(Enamelled hip to wrist
By mist and moon)
The threatening gun
In the hard heart of the storm.
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:
A thousand maidens offering
Their heads to have a poet sing;
Hard-drinking beaches laced with sun,
The torn wave where torn ships run
To wine and white-washed bungalows.
This summer sing what winter knows –
Love keeps a cuckoo in his clock
And death's the hammer makes the stroke.
Letter to Frank Sargeson
from Armidale, N.S.W.
If I shut my eyes here to the violent death
Alight in every tree as never at home,
It's quite an easy matter to catch my breath
Blowing old phantoms under a chilly moon,
And just step out again along the sand.
Here there's no water dashing at the land.
In such impossible moods I take the road
Up past the bakery (that world rebuilds,
Each sense takes up an old, accustomed load –
Green, garlic, Bach, new bread, a stroking sea)
And walk in on you telling Janet lies,
Cooking perhaps, writing – scenes multiply,
I cannot get them straight but all the same
Feel for the moment I'm again at home.
Escapes like these don't last of course, the shame
Is that they come at all, and leave behind
A fight in which I try to hold the scene,
But lose it to (say) someone round or lean
Coming to hand her latest essay in.
Soon there'll be snow here, and the English trees –
Sheltering as yet that least original sin
Practised by students – will be out of work,
Rooted upways in a watery dirt of sky.
(Season's disasters need a poet's eye.)
The windy gallows of these trees are right
For hanging thoughts of death on, but their mould
Dies a red that rages at the sight –
Burns on the roadside with a martyr's faith:
Maybe my numbering the leaves is wrong
Finding more cause in this than spring, for song.
Over the rasp of grass a breezy knife
Sharpens the morning, is by midday hot.
Nostalgia's tossed off with the bedclothes, life
Moves in the usual dust of compromise.
All roads lead to (or allow) return.
No Nero I, watching this autumn burn.
À la recherche du temps perdu
i L'acte gratuit
He walks where they have spent
Warm nights, branches over-bent
And street lights drumming. Now
Rain falls on him, leaves flow
Choking the drains, and over
Rain-blackened rocks like a lover
Ivy sprawls. Green to brown
To puddled slush, and down
The streaked air slide the lights of cars.
This street, this house, were hers –
She, the once beloved
Who chose the worst to prove
The choice was hers. Not loss
But a death, like the bones of trees
Above this thudding rain.
They may not keep even their pain.
ii Le cauchemar
In wind they walk above the town, the grey
Clouds low-racing, and in a high house
Shutters banging beyond a ruined gate;
All overgrown there under birch and elm
Yellowing, looking out on the valley town.
Here they turn, finding a stony path
Climbing through scrub. Sun slips away
Discreetly. He hears a distant night-bird drop
Malicious notes, round stones in a deep well.
A tree-frog buzzes like a broken wire.
Where is she now? He tries to call the name
He can't recall, while every moment adds
More scraping insect legs, more wattled throats
Blown up unseen into a glottal threat.
He fears the shadows, fights them, wakes alone.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Collected Poems 1951â"2006 by C. K. Stead. Copyright © 2008 C. K. Stead. Excerpted by permission of Auckland University Press.
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