C. K. Stead

An old friend, a new character - C. K. Stead is scribe to love and grief in this beautiful new collection. In two sequences the poet plays with the lines of history and love, the fictional and the autobiographical. Reflecting on a long career and familiar faces, the first sequence walks the reader from classical Rome to contemporary Aotearoa. Then in the shade of Parnell begins a tender address to a new character, Kezia, lover and friend just lost. Lyrical and deeply moving, In the Half Light of a Dying Day is a late-career masterpiece.

In this poignant new poetry collection, one of New Zealand’s most significant voices reflects on home, on away, and on friends living and dead. ‘I lead a life of quiet medication’, the poet claims, ‘longing for foreign shores, adventure and death.’ But whether swimming to the yellow buoy or remembering an encounter in Belsize Park, in the thick of it or asking, ‘what next?’, Stead’s voice is intimate, amusing and always compelling. "This Side of Silence resounds with intimations of mortality, compounded with reactions to a contemporary world of pandemic, climate change and war, but this collection is not in the least morose. Rather, the poetry is enlivening – concrete, particular, detailed and often playful. There is a wealth of sensory content, and each poem has its own satisfying shape, with easy idiomatic speech forming its special kind of rhythm. In this book a major modern poet continues to “live and sing”." - MacDonald P. Jackson "Stead has his usual quick wit and steely eye for his world and, at 90, has the linguistic dexterity that many thousands of aspiring writers can only dream about." - Chris Reed, NZ Booklovers

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'? 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.

New Zealand's most extraordinary literary everyman - poet, novelist, critic, activist - C. K. Stead told the story of his first twenty-three years in South-West of Eden. In this second volume of his memoirs, Stead takes us from the moment he left New Zealand for a job in rural Australia, through study abroad, writing and a university career, until he left the University of Auckland to write full time aged fifty-three. It is a tumultuous tale of literary friends and foes (Curnow and Baxter, A. S. Byatt and Barry Humphries and many more) and of navigating a personal and political life through the social change of the 1960s and 70s. And, at its heart, it is an account of a remarkable life among books - of writing and reading, critics and authors, students and professors. From Booloominbah to Menton, The New Poetic to All Visitors Ashore, from Vietnam to the Springbok Tour, C. K. Stead's You Have a Lot to Lose takes readers on a remarkable voyage through New Zealand's intellectual and cultural history.

In his eighty-sixth 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 `lugubrious rhyming’. He writes most often of those who have gone (Jacques Derrida and Allen Curnow, Peter Porter and Sarah Broom, Colin McCahon and Maurice Shadbolt, Lauris Edmond and Ted Hughes) but also of those still with us (Kevin Ireland and Fleur Adcock, Alan Roddick and Bill Manhire, Michael Frayn and Paula Rego, his family, himself caught naked in the mirror – and dancing). He takes us with him on the poetical life: from Dogshit Park in Budapest to a Zagreb bookshop to the Christchurch Word 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 laureate, who responds in the salty voice of Catullus that he has made his own so often before.

Max Jackson, a New Zealander living and lecturing in Paris, has a complicated arrangement with his estranged French wife, Louise. In love with his younger Sorbonne colleague Sylvie, he finds himself entangled with Helen, a troubled young English student.When a Cezanne painting goes missing from Louise's apartment, the boundaries he has struggled to maintain threaten to collapse.Infused with literary musings and the spirit of Paris, The Necessary Angel is as much an ode to the power of literature as a nuanced exploration of love, fidelity and the balance of power within relationships.

Max Jackson, a New Zealander living and lecturing in Paris, has a complicated arrangement with his estranged French wife, Louise. In love with his younger Sorbonne colleague Sylvie, he finds himself entangled with Helen, a troubled young English student.When a Cezanne painting goes missing from Louise's apartment, the boundaries he has struggled to maintain threaten to collapse.Infused with literary musings and the spirit of Paris, The Necessary Angel is as much an ode to the power of literature as a nuanced exploration of love, fidelity and the balance of power within relationships.

Gathered from throughout Stead's career, these stories are a reminder of his deft storytelling and literary power. They are clever, sensual, wry and beautifully written, with Stead's subtle sense of humour evident at every turn.The collection can be read as a meditation on the writerly life, and includes a number of new, previously unpublished stories, including Last Season's Man, which won the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award, as well as older stories that have been revised and rewritten. Set in locations as diverse as the South of France, Sydney, Zagreb, Auckland, San Francisco and Oxford, each story is vividly drawn.This extraordinary collection, along with Stead's history as New Zealand Poet Laureate (2015-17), confirms his position as an exceptionally talented writer.

Recently divorced New Zealander Sam Nola returns to London, where he spent two years in his early twenties. It is early 2003, and on both sides of the Atlantic the case for military intervention in Iraq is being made - or fabricated. But life for Sam has never been better: a grown-up, half-French daughter from a long-ago affair has recently got in touch, and he has walked into a lucrative role in the booming banking sector. It is only when he learns of the deaths of two friends within a week that intrigue begins to intrude on his contentment and life begins to feel a little more precarious.

The Yellow Buoy is CK Stead's fifteenth collection of poetry, in which the writer journeys in time and space from Croatia and Colombia to Karekare and the Cote d'Azur; Catullus returns to receive plaudits, write to friends and read the world; and various other literary fellows appear in person, dream or conversation - Allen Curnow and Hugh Kawharu, Frank Sargeson and Barry Humphries, Robert Creeley and Katherine Mansfield. Alongside glimpses of fantails and elegies for friends, The Yellow Buoy also includes translated versions of poems by Eugenio Montale, Carlo Vita and Philippe Jaccottet.

"Will appeal to lovers of the wayward novel game as it is played by Lawrence Sterne or Italo Calvino" - Jackie Wullschläger, Financial TimesProfessor Harry Butler is obsessed with the Mind/Body problem. Unfortunately, this is not the least of his problems. Harry's wife has turned his study into a sufi shrine where she sits cross-legged and chants for hours on end: "I am not this body..." And Harry doesn't know it yet but the Drug Squad have taken up residence in his kitchen so as to observe the movements of his neighbours and their visitors. Among these visitors, photographed by the drug squad, is one of his oldest friends. And living next door is a woman Harry may have had an encounter with in Singapore.The University is no escape from these complications on the domestic front: Harry's relationship with a student is causing concern among the Philosophy Department Women's Collective. Some of his colleagues also suspect him of going astray academically.The story takes place in Auckland, New Zealand. But who is telling the story? Why is he in Europe? Why does he keep moving from one city to another, and why does he seem to require the presence of a certain Uta Haverstrom in order to write it?The Death of the Body is a delightful blend of wit, intelligence and excitement.

'A vivid and engrossing historical novel' Daily TelegraphSpanning 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."

'I said many times I would not write autobiography - partly because it might signal, either to my inner self, or to others, a ""signing off"" as a writer; and partly because I did not want to mark off areas that were fact in my life from those that might yet be invented. Fiction likes to move, disguised and without a passport, back and forth across that border, and prefers it should be unmarked and without check-points.' - C K Stead. Happily for the many readers of his novels, poems, criticism and essays, C K Stead has changed his mind. In South-West of Eden, a coming-of-age memoir by New Zealand's leading poet, novelist and critic writes of a life 'lived by history' -running wild in Cornwall Park, joining the Labour Party aged seven, discovering poetry in a third-form English class and enjoying a newly married annus mirabilis in a flat on Takapuna Beach down the road from Frank Sargeson and Janet Frame. An Aucklander to the core - 'Most things of real significance in my life and the life of my family had happened somewhere in sight from the summit of Mt Eden' - Stead here turns his home town into a land of myth and symbol: Tamaki of many lovers, portage for ancient waka, wasp-waist of the fish of Maui, site of a Pakeha-planned and never built coast-to-coast canal and of the harbour-to-harbour ghost-tram, no longer running except in the head of an elderly writer, late in the night, remembering at his laptop. In a virtuoso performance, C K Stead wonderfully illuminates 23 years of his time and his place.

We all know the story of Jesus told by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, but what about the version according to Judas?In this witty, original and teasingly controversial account, some forty years after the death of Jesus, Judas finally tells the story as he remembers it.

This book offers a classic survey of modern English poetry from the new tradition established by Yeats in the 1890s through to Eliot, including a reassessment of the Georgians and the influence of Pound. Reading T. S. Eliot and reading about T. S. Eliot were equally formative experiences for my generation. One of the books about him which greatly appealed to me when I first read it...was "The New Poetic" by the New Zealand poet and critic, C. K. Stead.

The Black River collects C K Stead's most recent poems, written over the last eighteen months. The brilliant and moving focus of the collection is its final sequence, written after Stead suffered a stroke which temporarily affected his ability to read and write. Here fragmentary poems poignantly explore frailty and the closeness of death, the challenge of words and language, and the relieved and excited recovery of the power to use them. The remainder of the collection, written subsequently, is more sombre in tone than earlier work and shows a constant awareness of the 'black river' of mortality; but this is balanced by a joy in the vivid pleasures of the senses and of the physical world seen as all the more precious because of its fragility.

Reading T. S. Eliot and reading about T. S. Eliot were equally formative experiences for my generation. One of the books about him which greatly appealed to me when I first read it ...was The New Poetic by the New Zealand poet and critic, C. K. Stead...' Seamus Heaney, The Government of the Tongue (1986)