That Derrida Whom I Derided Died: Poems 2013–2017

by C.K. Stead

In his 85th year, C. K. Stead's new collection leads us deep inside the life of the poet. He looks back at his younger self, remembering old loves and cringing at his ‘sonnets' lugubrious rhyming'. He tells us of those who have gone – Derrida (‘that Derrida whom I derided died') and Curnow (‘Allen's as dead now / as an old friend can be which is / hardly at all), Peter Porter and Lucien Freud. And he takes us along with him on the poetical from Dogshit Park in Budapest to a Zagreb bookshop to the Christchurch Festival. The collection includes a series of poems written while the author was poet laureate, including a sequence on World War I in which ‘the Ministry' requests poems from our reluctant and sometimes defiant poet laureate.

129 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 9, 2018

About the author

Christian Karlson Stead is a New Zealand writer whose works include novels, poetry, short stories, and literary criticism.

One of Karl Stead's novels, Smith's Dream, provided the basis for the film Sleeping Dogs, starring Sam Neill; this became the first New Zealand film released in the United States.

Mansfield: A Novel was a finalist for the 2005 Tasmania Pacific Fiction Prize and received commendation in the 2005 Commonwealth Writers Prize for the South East Asia and South Pacific region.

C. K. Stead was born in Auckland. For much of his career he was Professor of English at the University of Auckland, retiring in 1986 to write full-time. He received a CBE in 1985 and was admitted into the highest honour New Zealand can bestow, the Order of New Zealand in 2007.

Reviews

[Marcus Hobson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a real mixed bag of verse, long-held memories, old friends recalled, verse written while New Zealand's poet laureate (required writing I think Ted Hughes used to call it) and memories while attending a literary festival in Christchurch.

There are lots of snippets to like and enjoy reading again. One about the ruined city of Christchurch caught my eye. It is called 'Tenses'.

Here are the buildings
cordoned off/
boarded up
that have a were
and perhaps a will be
but no is, or are.

In a poem called '14 x 14: Tercets in the spirit of Brecht' there are some wonderful challenges for the world imagined - a world where the Vatican sells off art to help refugees,Saudi girls drive taxis, Ireland embraces the condom and Americans give up guns. Each one progressively less likely.

Most of all you come away from this collection with a sense of passing time, of a poet in his eighties who is witness to too many funerals for friends and acquaintances, who hoards memories of past events, people, loves and lost opportunities. They are poignant memories, beautifully told.

[PJ Evans]

41 pages in, will not read more so may as well consider done with

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

NZ Novelist Damien Wilkens is quoted in this book as saying that C K Stead has always suffered from a surfeit of lucidity, and the fact that I could read through the book of poems in an hour or so is testament to that. Which doesn't however say that Stead's poetry is necessarily easy to read, nor that you can skim. He still has depth, and his ability to bring the right word or phrase to a moment, and his ability to give his poetry (almost entirely in this book) a real sense of rhythm without necessarily using familiar forms is considerable. Not only that but his poems have many vivid moments when you can see and sometimes feel physically what he's talking about. And there's much that is playful, in the spirit of the title, with many references to other poets and writers and artists, and a delight in words that makes the poems dance.
To say I've read the book in an hour or so is true, and unusually, there's a sense of a good deal of it still hanging around in the mind. Obviously, it needs more than one reading, like any book of poetry, but this read was certainly a good starting point.