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Collected Poems, 1951-2006
C. K. Stead is New Zealand's most distinguished living poet. Since publishing his first poems in periodicals like Landfall in the early 1950s, he has experimented with many forms and modes - from open form, free verse, journal composition, quotation and found text to personal lyric, translation and imitation - while always bringing a strong personality, deft craftsmanship and a background of realism to bear on his poetry. This Collected Poems includes the work of his fourteen volumes of poetry, from his first collection, Whether the Will is Free, to The Black River of 2007. In addition, it reprints 22 early previously uncollected poems that date from 1951 to 1961. Annotated by the author, the Collected Poems illustrates more than fifty years of the range and ambition of Stead's verse, in which the world always looks 'hard / at the word and the / word at the world'.
The Secret History Of Modernism
A chance meeting has New Zealand writer Laszlo Winter thinking back to his time in London in the late 1950s. The Empire might be in a state of collapse, but for young 'colonials', England remains a mythical place that draws them from the farthest corners of the globe. There was Australian Samantha Conlan, clever, desirable, hopelessly in love with married Jewish New Zealander Freddy Goldstein, who carried with him a dark history. Rajiv, an earnest young Indian at work on a study of Yeats and the Indian mind. The enigmatic Margot, whose bond with her athletic brother Mark troubled Laszlo in ways he didn't quite understand. Heather, the call girl with whom Laszlo exchanged lessons on Shakespea...
Shelf Life
What ghost was being appeased? What wrong was being righted or sin atoned for? I didn’t know. It was all, this writing business – and had been since it first began when I was still at school – mysterious, possibly even neurotic. I knew only that for a moment the world which ‘out there’ seemed so imperfect, so ‘fallen’, so much less than the heart desired, ‘in here’ had been called to order. Every morning for the last thirty years, C. K. Stead has written fiction and poetry. Shelf Life collects the best of his afternoon work: reviews and essays, letters and diaries, lectures and opinion pieces. In this latest collection, a sequel to the successful Answering to the Language, The Writer at Work, and Book Self, Stead takes the reader through nine essays in ‘the Mansfield file’, collects works of criticism and review in ‘book talk’, writes in the ‘first person’ about everything from David Bain to Parnell, and finally offers some recent reflections on poetic laurels from his time as New Zealand poet laureate. Throughout, Stead is vintage Stead: clear, direct, intelligent, decisive, personal.
Mansfield
'A vivid and engrossing historical novel' Daily Telegraph Spanning three years in the life of the writer Katherine Mansfield during the First World War, Mansfield follows the ups and downs of her relationship with Jack Middleton Murry and her struggle to write the 'new kind of fiction' which she felt the times demanded. She is restless, constantly on the move, in and out of London, to and from France, even into the war zone, to be with her French lover, novelist Francis Carco. For a short time, Mansfield is able to behave as though the war is merely 'background', but her ardent relationship with her brother, who arrives from New Zealand to fight in France, makes detachment impossible - as does her love for Jack's Oxford friend Frederick Goodyear, also a soldier. The war's shadow remorselessly darkens all their lives, but only increases Mansfield's determination to break through as a writer. Mansfield is a sharp, subtle and appealing portrait of the person of whose work Virginia Woolf wrote: "It was the only writing I was ever jealous of."
Talking About O'Dwyer
In his new bachelor flat, too close to comfort to his former family home, Mike Newall, Oxford don and Wittgenstein scholar seeks to rebuild his life, but feels increasingly weighed down by the past. When Donovan O'Dwyer, his colleague and fellow expatriate New Zealander dies, Newall attends the funeral. Afterwards, Newall reveals to his old friend Bertie Winterstoke the secret that O'Dwyer carried with him to his grave. During the battle for Crete in the Second World War, a soldier in New Zealand's Maori battalion died in harrowing circumstances. Believing his commanding officer, O'Dwyer, was responsible for the death, the soldier's family placed a makutu, a Maori curse, on him. Winterstoke ...
Five for the Symbol
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Book Self
For more than 40 years, C. K. Stead has been New Zealand's leading literary and cultural critic. Whether writing about Christianity or a trip to Croatia, he always brings a clear personal point of view, a strong analytical bent, and a witty pen to his work. In this latest collection of critical writing Book Self, a sequel to his successful books Kin of Place, Answering to the Language and The Writer at Work, Stead takes the reader on a personal journey, from his earliest discovery of poetry as a young man to his experiences on the literary trail over the last few years. And he takes us on a trip through literary history, from Katherine Mansfield and T. S. Eliot to Michael King and Elizabeth Knox. For the first time, Stead includes in this book a series of journal extracts that allow readers closer to the mind of the writer. 'Here the ego is exposed-not quite naked, but now and then with its shirt off,' he writes. In Book Self we see a great New Zealand critic at work - a writer with strong personal views about other writers and a deep commitment to the role of role of criticism in literary life.
My Name Was Judas
We all know the story of Jesus told by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, but what about the version according to Judas? In this account, Judas tells the story as he remembers it. This is a story of friendship and rivalry, of a time of uncertainty and enquiry, a testing of belief, endurance and loyalty.
Last Season’s Man (Fast Fiction)
A tale of rivalry and the consequences of getting what we pray for.
What You Made of It
Having left the university to write full-time at the end of volume two, Stead throws himself into his work. In novels like Sister Hollywood and My Name Was Judas, criticism in the London Review of Books and the Financial Times, poetry and memoir, Stead establishes his international reputation as novelist, poet and critic. It is also a period when Stead's fearless lucidity on matters literary and political embroil him in argument - from The Bone People to the meaning of the Treaty to the controversy over a London writer's flat. What was it like to be Allen Curnow's designated 'Critic across the Crescent'; or alternatively to be labelled 'the Tonya Harding of NZ Lit'? How did poems emerge from time and place, sometimes as naturally as 'leaves to a tree', sometimes effortfully? And how did novels about individual men and women retell stories of war (World War II, Yugoslavia, Iraq) and peace? Covering Stead's travels from Los Angeles to Liguria, Croatia and Crete to Caracas and Colombia, as New Zealand poet laureate and Kohi swimmer, What You Made of It takes us deep inside the mind and experience of one of our major writers - and all in Stead's famously lucid 'story-telling' prose.
