Notes

WHETHER THE WILL IS FREE (1964)

Published by Paul’s Book Arcade after I had despaired of the famously dilatory Leo Bensemann, who had accepted it for Caxton, ever actually doing it, though it was printed by Caxton for Paul’s Book Arcade. Acknowledgements to Landfall, Landfall Country, New Zealand Listener, Kiwi, Arena, Sydney Bulletin, Universities Poetry (UK) and the Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse edited by Allen Curnow.

‘Night Watch in the Tararuas’ won first prize in the undergraduate poetry section of Borestone Mountain Poetry Awards for poems published in 1954 (Stanford University Press, 1955).

‘À la recherche du temps perdu’: This is a revision, omitting one poem, of what appeared as ‘Three Poems in Afterthought’.

‘Whether the Will is Free’: The word ‘doved’ here was commonly heard when I was young meaning ‘dove-tailed’ – fitting perfectly.

I have radically revised (rewritten might be more accurate) ‘Dialogue on a Northern Shore’. The acknowledgments to Whether the Will is Free say that it was broadcast, and then telecast on the NZBC programme Focus. I have no memory of the telecast.

‘Winter Song’: I have restored the Yeats epigraph that was in an earlier version of the poem sent to Charles Brasch in April 1958.

‘Pictures in a Gallery Undersea’ appeared first in Landfall 50, June 1959. In Landfall 56, December 1960, it won the Landfall Readers’ Award, voted the ‘best poem’ in the magazine’s first fifteen years of publication. The fiction section was won by Frank Sargeson, and the non-fiction was shared by R. MacD. Chapman and Bill Pearson. Allan Phillipson, who did a PhD thesis on my poetry at the University of British Columbia, has persuaded me to restore the epigraphs which were omitted when the poem was reprinted in Crossing the Bar and Straw into Gold. In 2006 the Hocken Library gave me copies of my correspondence with Charles Brasch, which included an earlier, slightly longer version of the poem, and the following explanation of the epigraphs (my letter dated by Brasch 5 July 1959):

i. The muse has (always) blonde hair; sometimes – as in ‘The Twa Sisters of Binnorie’ – she is drowned and her hair is played upon by a minstrel (hence the Aeolian harp); at other times she drowns the minstrel. (See [Robert] Graves The Crowning Privilege, the first few pages of [the Clark Lectures, No. 4] ‘Harp, Anvil, Oar’.)

ii. This comes from [Paul] Valéry’s ‘Cimitière Marin’. The marble in ii is the marble of London, but it has the quality of a graveyard in which the shadows of the past are still active.

v. This is the first line spoken by Cinna the poet in [Shakespeare’s] Julius Caesar, before he is lynched by the crowd. Obviously appropriate to this section.

vii. Again from Valéry’s ‘C.M.’. Could be interpreted a number of ways, all appropriate to vii: Will the ombres of the poem continue singing, though dead? Will modern England sing though its past is dead? Will the persona of the poem sing when he is gone from the life of London? Etc. etc. ‘Sing’ in each case suggesting literature, poetry, more than anything. This line of course also ties up with ‘Binnorie, O Binnorie’ and the sister who tells her tale though drowned.

The same line, ‘Chanterez-vous quand vous serez vaporeuse?’ returns in my work half a century later as the opening lines of ‘Black River Blues’: ‘Will you sing / when you’re only a ghostly thing?’

‘Chorus’ is from a translation of Euripides’ Alcestis by Iain Lonie and C. K. Stead, first performed by the University Players, University of New England, in the Armidale Town Hall, N.S.W. in 1957, and subsequently broadcast by the ABC. Another of the choruses now appears in this volume’s ‘Early Uncollected’ section (pp. 511–12).

CROSSING THE BAR (1972)

Published by Auckland University Press/Oxford University Press, and reprinted in 1974. Dedicated to K. Some of the poems were reprinted from Whether the Will is Free. Acknowledgements as for Whether the Will is Free, plus Mate, Poetry Australia, Critical Quarterly, New Statesman, London Magazine, Punch, Commonwealth Poems of Today (ed. Howard Sergeant) and The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century New Zealand Verse (ed. Vincent O’Sullivan). In an earlier form this collection was called Bald Caesarion. Caesarion was Cleopatra’s son to Julius Caesar (also bald). He was probably murdered on the orders of Augustus. I didn’t feel I had got the title poem right, so only its opening lines appeared. It surfaced again, however, the whole poem this time, but slightly revised, in my 2002 collection, Dog.
    Crossing the Bar won the Jessie Mackay Award for poetry which was at that time the major New Zealand award for poetry. It was later replaced by the New Zealand Book Award for poetry and became an award for a first book. The poems in the first section reflect, mainly obliquely but sometimes directly, my concern at that time about the Vietnam War and my involvement in the anti-war movement.

‘You have a lot to lose’ was commissioned by the Poetry Book Society for the Commonwealth Arts Festival of 1965 and I read it first at the Royal Court Theatre, London, during the Festival readings. It was set for voice and orchestra by Doris Sheppard and I have a note to say it was performed by the NZSO though I have no recollection of having heard this performance. In 2007 Professor Douglas Monro of Victoria University, who is working on Sheppard’s life and music, sent me a copy of her piano score for the song-cycle. He tells me that in Radio New Zealand’s sound archive there is a recording of a performance by Bruce Chandler, tenor, with the National Orchestra/Alex Lindsay String Orchestra, dated 16 December 1969.

‘A Small Registry of Births and Deaths’: This appeared first in the New Statesman. The reference in the penultimate section to Lyndon Johnson’s ‘Birds’ comes from the fact that his wife was known as Lady Bird Johnson, and I think two daughters had parallel ‘Bird’ names. ‘Even without his gall’, and the nation watching his heartbeat, refers to the fact that Johnson had his gall bladder removed at this time, giving some anxiety to his few remaining supporters. The ‘side-burned sage’ in the final section is Matthew Arnold.

‘Crossing the Bar’: Brumel in this poem is the Russian Valery Brumel, world record holder at the time (1965) for the high jump. It springs partly from the fact that I was a high jumper at school.

‘With a Pen-Knife’: I have written at some length about this poem and its subject in an essay called ‘Poetry and Politics (and a beating)’, in Book Self (AUP, 2008), pp. 103–10.

‘Meeting of Cultures’: The ‘fire-crowned bishop’ is an African bird.

‘April Notebook’: Like most of the poems I wrote at this time, this one is full of the atmosphere of the Vietnam War and the protests against it.

‘Like’: Vines of flowers such as the ones described here lined the drive in to Balmoral Intermediate School when I went there in 1945, so one was welcomed in by the waving wings of dying butterflies.

‘Putting it Straight in London’: Anyone interested in what is ‘true’ and ‘untrue’ in this poem should look at Dr Gerri Kimber’s interview with me in London in 2006, in Book Self, p. 361.

‘On the Publication of Frank Sargeson’s Memoirs of a Peon’: For a later, more complex view of this novel, see my Kin of Place: Essays on 20 New Zealand Writers (AUP, 2002), pp. 51–64.

‘What Will it Be?’: The alternative last line when this appeared in Punch read ‘Lord, what waits for Logue, for Lowell?’ Of the four nominated poets the answer to the question has now been found for three. Logue remains very much alive.

‘Myrtle’: The myrtle plant is sacred to Venus.

‘A Charm’: Tusitala was the name given to R. L. Stevenson in Samoa, and Vailima (five rivers) the name of his property there.

QUESADA (1975)

Published by The Shed – i.e. this was my own experiment at publishing my own work. Dedicated to Aristide Caillaud. For acknowledgements, see the notes below to Poems of a Decade, where these poems reappeared. This collection won the first New Zealand Book Award for poetry. It was part-product of my receiving the (as it then was) Winn-Manson Mansfield Fellowship to Menton, France, in 1972.

‘The Swan’ is an attempt to translate Baudelaire’s ‘Le Cygne’ as accurately as I could while keeping the formal rhyme scheme. The same is attempted with Apollinaire’s ‘Le Pont Mirabeau’.

‘For a Children’s L.P.’: ‘Ecology’ – In fact the filling of Hobson Bay, Auckland, referred to here, was stopped and the bay has been preserved.

WALKING WESTWARD (1979)

Also published by The Shed. For acknowledgements see Poems of a Decade where these poems reappeared.

‘Breaking the Neck’: It was 24 January (my mother’s birthday) I think 1981 that I broke my neck in the surf at Karekare. It was what’s called ‘a stable fracture’, so only almost rather than actually serious – but dramatic at the time, and extremely painful. The section ‘Long before …’ was later translated into German by the German-born Dutch writer Elisabeth Augustin, and that translation appears in the sequence ‘Yes T.S.’ in Geographies.

‘Twenty-two Sonnets’: Sonnet 1 – This records the death of Prime Minister Norman Kirk. The Maurice addressed in the first line was Maurice Duggan who died three months later.
    Sonnet 8 – This piece of literary game-playing, which (mis)quotes, first, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and then, at the end, the lines from Henry IV, part I, which are inscribed on Katherine Mansfield’s grave, sprang from a note Maurice Duggan wrote me signed

The event with Allen Curnow and the bantams was not invented.
    Sonnet 9 – I took the young man’s word for it that he was the son of a 7th Fleet Admiral and had gone to jail sooner than to war in Vietnam. Some friends of his age thought he might be a CIA spy.
    Sonnet 19 – This is an attempt to achieve a close translation of Baudelaire’s poem ‘Correspondences’, but adapting it to the form of the sonnet.

‘Walking Westward’: The title poem became part of a plan (indicated in the later poem ‘Scoria’) to write a sequence of five long poems that might, in the end, be published together. This one was all contemporary in time, but ranged about in space. The second, ‘Scoria’, was to be fixed in space (Auckland/Tamaki-makau-rau) but range about in time – history and pre-history, human and geological. The third, ‘Paris’, was to be a literary-cultural-intellectual place-and-time, a location of the mind as much as, or more than, ‘real’ Paris. When that section finally appeared, however, it was in a completely different form from the first two, a sign that the work was taking its own path. The fourth part was to be ‘the Wars’, but pieces of what would have gone into it have been used in the sequence ‘Voices’ (the Land Wars), the novel Talking about O’Dwyer (the Battle of Crete) and the poem sequence ‘Crete’, and more recently in the sequence ‘History’ (Italy) in The Black River. There are also elements (World War I) in my novel Mansfield. What the fifth part, ‘the Smoky Athletes’, was to be has become hazy over time, but the image itself came partly from Dante’s Paulo and Francesca episode, where the rather nice but unfortunately illicit lovers run endlessly in Hell pursued by the hot winds of lust. Also the stylistic intentions of this sequence had been overtaken by the long poem ‘Yes T.S.’ in Geographies – so the five-part long poem was never completed.

‘Uta’: The original fifty poems from Walking Westward have been somewhat culled, revised and rearranged here into the semblance of a narrative. I wrote these ‘translations’ knowing no Japanese but using scholars’ (principally Waley’s) transliterations, notes, grammars and glossaries, in the way Pound used Fenollosa’s. I was less concerned with exact fidelity to the sense of the original than with catching something of their spirit. I cut down the Uta form from its fixed 5, 7, 5, 7, 7 – a total of 31 – syllables to as few as I could make it while still preserving the bones of the original statement. And I imposed on myself the (I suppose arbitrary) discipline of retaining the original Japanese line-order, which is often altered in translations to make English sense.

GEOGRAPHIES (1982)

Published by Auckland University Press/Oxford University Press. Acknowledgements to Islands, Landfall, New Zealand Listener, Pilgrims, Poems for the Eighties (Wai-te-ata Press), London Magazine, London Review of Books and the souvenir programme of the International Poetry Festival, Toronto, 1981.

‘Scoria’ was the second in the planned sequence of five long poems (see the note to Walking Westward above). The person referred to in the section beginning ‘“Owairaka” (said Robinson)’ was a teacher of that name (he was ‘Mr Robinson’, and I have no idea of his first name) at Maungawhau School, Mt Eden, when I was in standard 4 (1943) who was unusual, and to whom I remain grateful, because he gave us many Maori stories and legends of the region which remained with me and came back when I was writing this poem. I have no certainty about their provenance or authenticity, but I think Kendrick Smithyman (who liked the poem very much) traced at least one to John White’s Ancient History of the Maori.
    The section beginning ‘Aspire to no forge nor flight’ describes my high jumping on the front lawn at home (later I was Mt Albert Grammar School champion), and thus relates to the title poem of Crossing the Bar.

‘Yes T.S.’: Some of my intentions, described above, for five long poems were anticipated and used up in this sequence tracing a late-twentieth-century writer-and-academic’s reflections, observations and anxieties in the course of a not untypical literary tour/circumnavigation. A few revisions and rearrangements have been made for reasons which are purely stylistic/aesthetic. ‘Did a nightingale (etc.)’ – I later discovered the source of the cock-crow in Bloomsbury was a kindergarten/nursery where a few farm animals were kept so city children could experience them – ‘the poetry of fact’ again.
    ‘17.10.32’ – I crossed the Channel on my 48th birthday and record the (as it seemed, and still seems) extraordinary coincidence that I read the passage quoted from Jean Rhys’s novel After Leaving Mr Mackenzie in my Paris hotel that night.
    ‘Il faut demeurer …’, etc. – Here I am experimenting with writing French verse, translating it into English, and then the other way about, English into French, with no certainty of grammatical or lexical correctness. However, the ‘je est une auto / elle suis Rimbaud’ comes not out of grammatical ignorance but is a parody of Rimbaud’s ‘je est un autre’ – literally ‘I is another’ and meaning, I take it, that the self is somehow alien – which is how I was feeling at the time.

‘The Clodian Songbook: 15 Adaptations’: My note to these in Geographies indicated that they are not translations but that each gets its start from a particular Catullus poem – in order (the Catullus number in brackets): 1 (1), 2 (2), 3 (4), 4 (5), 5 (7), 6 (8), 7 (11), 8 (12), 9 (13), 10 (15), 11 (16), 12 (17), 13 (18), 14 (22), 15 (101).

POEMS OF A DECADE (1983)

Published by Pilgrims South Press, Dunedin, in both hard- and soft-cover, this collection was mainly a reprint of ‘April Notebook’ from Crossing the Bar, together with all the poems of Quesada and Walking Westward, and the few new poems included here. One sonnet was added to the sequence that had appeared in Walking Westward. Acknowledgements (which included the poems from Quesada and Walking Westward) were made to Cave, Education, Islands, Landfall, New Zealand Listener, Poetry New Zealand, Poetry Australia; to the anthologies A Cage of Words (ed. Harvey McQueen), Oxford Twentieth Century New Zealand Poetry (ed. Vincent O’Sullivan), New Zealand Writing since 1945 (ed. Vincent O’Sullivan and MacD. P. Jackson), Fifteen Contemporary New Zealand Poets (ed. Alistair Paterson), Mystical Choice (ed. Helen Shaw), New Zealand Love Poems (ed. James Bertram), The Penguin Book of New Zealand Poetry (ed. Harvey McQueen and Ian Wedde) and The Oxford Book of Contemporary New Zealand Poetry (ed. Fleur Adcock); and to Margaret Hayward’s Diary of the Kirk Years.

PARIS (1984)

This was published by Auckland University Press in association with Oxford University Press, with illustrations by Gregory O’Brien, a student in my 1983 Creative Writing class who at the time had never been to France. This was the third of the planned five long poems (see notes to Walking Westward and Geographies). Its location is, as intended, a place as much of the mind as of geography (space) and history (time) – ‘the Paris of Paris that’s nobody’s dream but your own’; but it presented itself in long lines and in twenty ten-line stanzas, very different from the open forms of ‘Walking Westward’ and ‘Scoria’. I have no idea why this should have been the case, and it certainly followed no precedent. It might be argued that these are almost-Alexandrines – the traditional French form – but if so they are somewhat rough-hewn, and that thought was not in my mind at the time. Though the poem draws heavily on memories of visits to Paris, it was all written in Auckland. There are some things in poetry which simply happen – are so – and nothing to be done but note them.

The ‘Denise’ quoted in 3 was the poet Denise Levertov with whom I read at the Toronto Harbourfront Festival in 1981.

BETWEEN (1988)

Published by Auckland University Press and dedicated to Allen Curnow. Acknowledgements to (NZ) Islands, Landfall, Listener, Poetry New Zealand, Rambling Jack and Tango; (Australia) Poetry Australia, Scripsi and Sydney Morning Herald; (Canada) Ariel and Malahat Review; (UK) London Magazine, London Review of Books and PN Review. Some appeared subsequently in New Zealand Poetry, 1972–86, edited by Mark Williams.

‘After the Wedding’: I renamed my cousins in this poem, in case they didn’t want to be made use of in public by their writing relative, though it now seems they wouldn’t have minded. The two referred to as Elspeth and Caroline were Jane and Elizabeth Worsfold, though I think cousin Colleen Bowmar was also part of the mix in this poem. A lot of the background to this and similar Northland poems may be found in my novel The Singing Whakapapa.

‘Two Dates from the Auckland Calendar’: 12.9.81 was the date of the final South Africa–New Zealand test match of the infamous 1981 Springbok tour; 4.4.86 was the police/military assault on the Ngati Whatua (and supporters) occupation of disputed land on Bastion Point.

‘Deconstructing the Rainbow Warrior’: The French bombers, Alain Mafart and Dominique Prieur, were travelling on false passports as a married couple with the surname Turenges. French pronunciation facilitates a bad pun here; and the poem mocks French literary theory and the critical methodology of ‘Deconstruction’.

‘Paris: the End of a Story’: The poem opens with the often replayed scene of the Saigon chief of police executing a Vietcong prisoner in the street.
‘Ludwig’ is the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951).
    One of Wilfred Owen’s best-known First World War poems mocks ‘The old lie: Dulce et decorum est / Pro patria mori.’ And the inscription on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Paris reads, ‘Ici répose un soldat inconnu mort pour la patrie.’
    Horváth – Ödön von Horváth (1901–38), Hungarian-born, German, then Austrian, playwright who offended the Nazis with his political plays. He dreamed his destiny awaited him in Paris, went there, and died as described in a rainstorm.

‘From the Clodian Songbook’: As with the Catullus poems in Geographies, these are not translations but sometimes versions, sometimes approximations, sometimes poems which use the Roman poet only as a stepping-off point for going in a different direction. The persona is neither Catullus nor myself, but a shifting fictional identity somewhere in between. The starting point for each, putting the Catullus in brackets, are as follows: 1 (3), 2 (6), 3 (9), 4 (10), 5 (14), 6 (21), 7 (24), 8 (26), 9 (27), 10 (32), 11 (34), 12 (40), 13 (42), 14 (44), 15 (46), 16 (49), 17 (58), 18 (92), 19 (96), 20 (107). There is no overlap in source poems between this set and the set in Geographies, so the two could be fitted together to make one sequence, but I have preferred to retain the books as collections belonging to their time of publication.

‘Kin of Place’: Ken Smithyman’s first book was called The Blind Mountain. I bought it as a student before I’d met him and found it contained a sonnet to Graham Perkins who was best man (I was groomsman) at my sister’s wedding. The book title I helped him select was Inheritance, 1962. Ken and I became colleagues when he joined the Auckland University English Department as a senior tutor. A childhood spent partly in the North was what made us ‘kin of place’. Ken’s poem about our meeting on a beach with wives and children and his showing a shell he’d discovered is ‘About Verbs’, published in Earthquake Weather, 1972, p. 58.

‘The Radiant Way’: This sonnet was a sort of farewell to the academia of the period when French literary theory was fashionable. It takes its title and theme from a novel by Margaret Drabble.

VOICES (1990)

Dedication: To the memory of my grandmother Caroline Karlson, née Flatt, 1881-1954. This sequence was written in response to a commission from the Hon. Dr Michael Bassett, Minister of Arts and Culture at the time, to write a poem for the New Zealand 1990 celebrations commemorating 150 years since the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi. Rather than one poem, I wrote a sequence, taking significant, and insignificant but typical or exemplary, moments out of those 150 years. I used traditional forms – sonnets and formal stanzas – mainly five-stress lines, and often patterns of rhymes and half rhymes. The reason for preferring this more conservative style was that I felt to use the freer forms that had become characteristic of my work over the previous two decades might draw attention to the poet rather than the occasion, to virtuosity rather than to substance, and I felt the poet should be largely absent, or anyway not too clearly present. I thought also that the poems would fulfil their commission better if they were simple and direct enough to appeal widely, and perhaps be used in senior classes in schools. The result is therefore untypical and, some would argue, a little flat-footed. In their defence, however, I note that when quite a large part of the sequence was given a very good radio production they were shown to have some considerable dramatic potential, i.e. they worked as voices.

‘1820 The Missionary’: Based partly on John Butler. The story about the visitor frightening the ‘natives’ by pretending to be a ghost comes from Edward Markham’s journal.

‘19 October 1836 The Catechist’: This is based on the experience of my great-great-grandfather, John Flatt (grandfather of my grandmother to whose memory the Voices collection is dedicated). But in fact more happened than merely the theft of his horse and clothes. One of his party, a Maori girl, Tarore, was murdered. I have used this well-documented event in my novel The Singing Whakapapa (1994). In 1977 Tarore’s grave at Waharoa was marked and a new inscription unveiled by the Maori Queen, Dame Te Atairangikaahu, saying that Tarore’s Luke Gospel, taken by her killers, converted the Arawa tribe to Christianity and thus ‘brought peace to the tribes of Aotearoa’.

‘1840 The Treaty’: 5 February The Girl – a representative figure; 5 February The Printer – William Colenso; 8 February The Settler – a representative figure; 8 February The Chief – a composite figure of several who spoke on that day; 15 April The Governor – William Hobson, recounted by Colenso; 21 May The Governor – William Hobson. In the last, the exigencies of the sonnet don’t allow room to make clear that Captain Pearson was arrested in Port Nicholson but escaped to sail north and warn Hobson what was happening there. Hobson felt the Wakefield settlers in what was to become Wellington were taking the law into their own hands, and resolved to make Auckland the capital.

‘1840 The Dream’: John Logan Campbell, ‘father of Auckland’ and author of Poenamo.

‘1848 The Radical’: Thomas Arnold (brother of the poet Matthew). In the first sonnet he is sailing to Otago in the John Wickliffe with William Cargill and family. Arnold is sailing partly to get over his rejection by Miss Henrietta Whatley (‘Etty’). 1848 was the year of revolutions in Europe, and Arnold’s reflecting on an account of events in Paris that has come to him from his friend the poet Arthur Hugh Clough.

‘1850 The Settler’: Based on a story told to me by my grandmother about her grandmother.

‘1860 The Pakeha-Maori’: Based on the conclusion to F. E. Maning’s Old New Zealand.

‘1860 The Soldier’: An imagined British soldier in the Taranaki land wars.

‘1862 The Boy’: Based on an early recollection of William PemberReeves recorded in his biography by Keith Sinclair.

‘1864 The Warrior’: An imagined warrior who has made his escape from the battle of Orakau which came to be known as ‘Rewi’s last stand’.

‘1869 The War’: 12 April The Raid – This was by Te Kooti’s Ringatu warriors on the stockade at Mohaka. The people named, and events, are real. 14 April The Colonel – Colonel (later Major-General Sir George) Whitmore dined at the Auckland Club on that date and talked of war and the future.

‘1875 The Girl’: The speaker here is about eight years old – based on Helen Wilson’s autobiography, My First Eighty Years.

‘24 January 1884 The Visit’: This was long after Te Kooti’s war and the massacre at Matawhero, for which he was held responsible, and after his pardon. The speaker is Adela Stewart, author of My Simple Life in New Zealand.

‘1889 The Gentleman’: A fiction based on a news report in the New Zealand Herald of the time.

‘1899 The Empire’: A fiction, some elements of which are derived from T. E. Y. Seddon’s The Seddons.

‘1908 The Actress’: The first two stanzas are based largely on Ngaio Marsh’s autobiography, Black Beech and Honeydew. The third I suppose attributes my own preoccupations to her.

‘1915 The Commanding Officer’: This is Colonel William George Malone, killed at Gallipoli after the taking of Chunuk Bair, 8 August. Malone kept a diary which has been published.

‘1917 The Mother’: Based on my great-grandmother, Annie McDermott, daughter-in-law of John Flatt, who figures in the poem dated 1836.

‘Cornwall 1918 The Expatriates’: the painter is Frances Hodgkins, the writer Katherine Mansfield. Both lived in Cornwall in 1918, and I have imagined their almost-encounter.

‘1925 The District Nurse’: Derived from several books on medical practice and conditions in New Zealand in the 1920s and 1930s, in particular King Country Nurse by Frances Hayman.

‘1929 The Immigrant Artist’: This draws in particular on An Artist’s Daughter by Jane Garrett about her father Christopher Perkins, though the Wellington observations are my own. The poem reappeared in Big Weather: Poems of Wellington, edited by Greg O’Brien and Louise White, 2000.

‘1932 The Student’: Based partly on an anecdote in Elsie Locke’s Student at the Gates, though I make the student more divided between the attractions of opera and Marxism than Locke appears to have been.

‘1939–45 The War’: These six sonnets are a fiction based on fact, including some of my own recollections. ‘Tiny’ is General Bernard Freyberg, VC, Commander of NZDiv, and ‘Monty’ is Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery, Commander of the British Eighth Army in the Western Desert.

‘1945 The Explanation’: This is based on a real incident in which Colonel Humphrey Dyer, then the (Pakeha) CO of the Maori Battalion, shot a wounded Maori soldier – an act for which the soldier’s family subsequently put a makutu (curse) on him. This became the central event in my novel Talking about O’Dwyer, and when I came to investigate the facts I found a much darker version of what happened. The account given here is what comes to be called, in the novel, ‘the sanitised version’.

‘1945 The Anniversary’: The voice here is my own. My father, J. W. A. Stead, was Auckland President of the Labour Party at the time. The late leader is Michael Joseph Savage, and the remark about his never having framed a sentence anyone remembered is from John A. Lee’s Simple on a Soapbox. Lee was the rival expelled for criticising Savage, but outlived him by many years.

‘1947 The Orchestra’: My cousin who played the oboe in the National Orchestra was Ngaire Stead; the cabinet maker who played the flute was Victor Cater, father of my school friend Don. I have taken a slight liberty here – the two may not have played in the orchestra at the same time.

‘1951 The Wharfie’: This is fiction based partly on Glen Catton, a deregistered wharfie, father of another of my school friends, Barry, and partly on Jim Henderson’s Gunner Inglorious.

‘Christmas 1953 The Queen’: Her Majesty was in residence in Government House, Auckland, when the Tangiwai rail disaster occurred on Christmas eve. In the choir of children who came to sing carols to her in the garden on Christmas morning was a plump schoolboy called David Lange.

‘Rome 1960 The Athlete’: Murray Halberg won the 5000 metres at the Rome Olympics. Specs Julian and Peter Snell were fellow athletes in Auckland, and Arthur Lydiard their coach. Snell won the 800 metres at Rome, and the 800 and 1500 in the Tokyo Olympics four years later. The story about praying to the gods was told to me by Maurice Shadbolt who had it (he said) from Halberg.

‘1971 The Revolution’: This is the sexual revolution of the late 1960s, associated with the protest movement especially against the war in Vietnam.

‘31 August 1974 The Private Secretary’: The Prime Minister is Norman Kirk, the secretary Margaret Hayward, and the poem draws its facts from her Diary of the Kirk Years.

‘25 July 1981 The Clergyman’: The speaker is watching the break-in at Rugby Park, Hamilton, during the infamous Springbok Tour. This was the only occasion when protest actually prevented a tour match being played. After that the Muldoon Government got tough, the protest increased, and there was something close to civil war in the country. I was awarded my (to date) only criminal conviction for my part on that day, and a fine of $250 and costs.

‘10 July 1985 The Secret Agent’: This is the bombing of the Greenpeace ship, Rainbow Warrior, in Auckland Harbour by agents of the French secret service, to prevent it monitoring nuclear testing in the Pacific. The speaker is Captain Dominique Prieur who with Major Alain Mafart was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to ten years’ jail. More significant agents escaped, and the French Government used economic bullying to force the transfer of Prieur and Mafart to serve their sentences on French Pacific territories from where they were soon repatriated home to France and freed.

‘1990 At the Grave of Governor Hobson’: Here the author speaks in his own persona, and the forbear referred to is another great-great-grandfather, Martin McDermott, whose grave is still easily found across the road from Hobson’s.

STRAW INTO GOLD: POEMS NEW AND SELECTED (1997)

This was a selection from Whether the Will is Free to Voices, with new poems written since Voices and published for the first time. The new poems have been cut down in number and rearranged into groups for the present volume.

THE RIGHT THING (2000)

This collection was published by Auckland University Press and re-issued by Arc in the UK in the same year with a very slightly altered selection of poems. ‘I’ve seen the future and it’s OK’ appeared only in the Arc edition and ‘Even Newer English Bible’ only in the AUP edition. Acknowledgements: (NZ) Landfall, New Zealand Listener, New Zealand Books, Salt, Sport; (UK) The Forward Book of Poetry, 2001, London Magazine, London Review of Books, New Writing 7, PN Review, Poetry Review, Times Literary Supplement; (Australia) Sydney Morning Herald; (Canada) Malahat Review; (USA) Cumberland Poetry Review.
    A large part of this collection was written during 1996–97 when I was Senior Visiting Fellow at St John’s College, Oxford.

‘Encounters’ was written for Peter Porter’s 70th birthday volume, Paeans for Peter Porter, 1999.

‘Ravidus the Bookman’ appeared first in Poetry Review and then in The Forward Book of Poetry, 2001. In Areté, Autumn 2001, an unsigned piece claimed ‘there are those who believe’ that the model for Ravidus was sometime Faber fiction editor, and subsequently Observer’s books editor, Robert McCrum. Areté then goes on, clearly tongue in cheek, to show why this could not be so, in particular because Ravidus in the poem is said to write ‘execrable prose’.

‘The Other Place’ is how Cambridge is referred to in Oxford – rather than naming it.

‘Lessons in Modern History (i)’: ‘1956 West’ – It was Lady Eden, the British P.M.’s wife, who said it was as if the Suez Canal was flowing through the sitting room at Number 10. Why did I give her a cockney accent? I suppose because that was as absurd as the stories Sir Anthony told to explain the British and French invasion of the Suez Canal. The whole affair was shameless and mendacious.

‘1956 East’ – Mr B and Mr K were the Russian leaders Nikolai Bulganin and Nikita Khrushchev.

‘Lessons in Modern History (ii)’: ‘C.K.’ – The Cuban missile crisis.

    ‘1963 HiJKL’ – Jack and Jackie were the Kennedys, Lee was Lee Harvey Oswald who shot

Kennedy, Lyndon was Lyndon Johnson, and the second Jack was Jack Ruby, who shot Oswald.
    ‘1965’ – This was when the United States decided the line between North and South Vietnam was an international boundary and that therefore ‘an invasion’ had occurred.
    ‘1968 made …’ – Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King, the Tet Offensive in Vietnam and Lyndon Johnson.
    ‘1974’ – Tricky Dicky was Nixon’s nickname.

‘Hollywood’: I was working with Donaldson on completing a movie script of my novel Villa Vittoria. See below, the notes about ‘Rapallo: an Economy’ in The Red Tram.

‘Nine Nines’: ‘Sylvia’ – Sylvia Plath was born 27.10.32; C.K.S. 17.10.32.

‘Crete’: Drafted 1998 during a visit to the island in the course of working towards my novel Talking about O’Dwyer, and finished immediately afterwards during another stay in Oxford. It reappeared in Gifts: Poetry for Senior Students, edited by Harvey McQueen, 2000.

DOG (2002)

Acknowledgements: The sequence King’s Lynn and the Pacific was published as a separate book by the King’s Lynn Poetry Festival in 2003, in a paperback edition and a hardback of 50 copies signed by the author. Dog (the complete collection) was published by Auckland University Press in 2000 and re-issued in the UK by Arc in 2004.

Acknowledgements: (NZ) Landfall, New Zealand Listener, Metro, Moving Worlds, New Zealand Books, Sport, Under Flagstaff: An Anthology of Dunedin Poetry (ed. Robin Law and Heather Murray); (UK) Areté, Leviathan Quarterly, London Magazine, Nonesuch, Stand; (Australia) Island.

‘King’s Lynn & the Pacific’: at the King’s Lynn Poetry Festival, October 2001, I received the Festival’s fourth Poetry Award. This gives the recipient £1000 and requires him or her to spend a brief time in King’s Lynn and an equal time in one of the ports with which Lynn (as the locals call it) traded at the time of its maritime heyday, and then to write a poem (or poems) based on that experience. The first recipient, Peter Porter, had written about Lynn and the Netherlands. Kit Wright had gone to Portugal. My immediate predecessor, Pauline Stainer, had gone to Iceland. I decided it was time to bring my own region into the picture. Although there may not have been ships that sailed from King’s Lynn to the Pacific, its seamen certainly did – most notably James Burney (younger brother of Fanny Burney and son of the musician Charles Burney) and George Vancouver.
    James Burney (1750–1821) joined the Royal Navy at ten (which meant that such childhood as he had was spent at Lynn), and later sailed with Cook’s second and third expeditions to the Pacific. So did George Vancouver (1757–98), who later gave his name to the city and the island of Vancouver in Canada, and whose statue stands on the quay in King’s Lynn in sight of the famous Customs House, which first his father, then his brother, had charge of as Collector of Customs. Both Burney and Vancouver attended Lynn Grammar School. On the Cook expeditions they visited New Zealand more than once, and other places in the South Pacific, including Tahiti (Otaheiti), Tonga and Hawaii. Both were involved in the drama of Cook’s murder. Both had successful subsequent careers – as naval officers (retiring with the rank of Rear Admiral) and as writers on the subject of maritime exploration.

‘The Captain’s Servant’: Boys must have attended Grammar School at an early age in the eighteenth century. The usher who told young Jem Burney ‘murderer’s tales’ and then was found to have committed a murder was Eugene Aram. Seventy years later Thomas Hood wrote a melodramatic poem about him, ‘The Dream of Eugene Aram, the Murderer’, in which he is portrayed as revealing his guilt by telling stories of murder to one of his pupils. Hood probably meant the pupil to be Jem Burney.

‘In Principio’: George Vancouver was seven years younger than James Burney, who had risen from captain’s servant to midshipman by the time both were signed up for Cook’s second expedition. Both sailed from Portsmouth on Cook’s ship, Resolution, Vancouver as a trainee. In Cape Town Burney was promoted to lieutenant and transferred to the second ship, the Adventure, under Captain Tobias Furneaux.

‘Bread etc.’: Omai, who was taken to England as an example of the Noble Savage, and was for a time a great success there, meeting the King and moving in high society, is the subject of a book, Omai: Pacific Envoy, by my sometime colleague Eric McCormick. Burney, who managed the Tahitian language better than Omai managed English, befriended him. Omai made a great impression on Fanny Burney, and also on Dr Johnson. Cook, who had known many such ‘savages’ and failed to detect any special ‘nobility’ in this one, returned Omai home on his third voyage to the South Seas.

‘Tonga’: The words are as Burney transcribed them, and show he had a good ear and memory. The notes to Beaglehole’s edition of Cook’s Journal (Vol. III, Part 2) show how the words would now be written (‘O sisi tu O sisi tu matala’, for example, the opening line) and suggests what they probably meant. My version is a free rendering.

‘Navigation’: Harrison’s ‘watch’ was a clock resistant to all vicissitudes of sea travel (pitch and roll, extremes of heat and cold) and thus able to keep Greenwich time, while daily readings of the sun fixed local time. The difference established the longitude exactly and thus overcame a problem in navigation which had caused many ships to be lost. On his second voyage Cook took an approved copy of Harrison’s watch made by Larcum Kendall. He referred to it as ‘Mr Kendall’s Watch’ and reported its success. I have used Harrison’s name since he deserves the credit. The other three chronometers taken on the voyage, made by John Arnold, all broke down.

‘Postscript’ jumps forward several years to Cook’s third voyage and to his death. The facts are compressed. Vancouver was involved in the fighting at one point, though not where Cook was killed, and took a blow on the head defending Thomas Edgar, Master of the Discovery. Burney watched from the ship. Next day two armed boatloads, one commanded by Burney, the other by King, went ashore to try to recover Cook’s body. Bern Anderson, in his book Surveyor of the Sea, says Captain Clerke, who was now in charge of the expedition, used Burney and Vancouver to negotiate because they were the two with some command of Polynesian languages. Because Cook was thought to have been the god Erono, his body was prized, as the relics of saints have been by the Christian church. It had been divided among the chiefs, and probably only the threat of war caused any of it to be given up.

‘Applause’ goes with my grateful thanks to the University of Bristol for the award of an Honorary Doctorate in Letters in 2001, forty years after I completed my PhD there.

‘Washington’: This is a poem about public eloquence, and the titles indicate no more than a style in each case. The ‘Cynara’ with whom I spent three (innocent) days in Washington was Elizabeth Knox. The ‘Quaker boy’ was Richard Nixon whose farewell speech, especially given my contempt for him and my joy at his departure in disgrace, struck me as oddly eloquent. The ‘Caesar’ whose ‘worthy wank’ rang in my ears in 1963 was John F. Kennedy.

‘Vincent’: This story about a well-known New Zealand poet was told to me, admiringly (as it is recorded here), by a contemporary who was in the class at the time.

‘Auckland’: The shape of this poem mimics the shape of the Auckland Sky Tower.

‘Beauty’: This is a (very considerable!) recasting in modern terms of Ovid’s story of Apollo and Hyacinthus.

‘Bald Caesarion’: See notes to Crossing the Bar (p. 521) for this poem’s history

‘At Wagner’s Tomb’ followed a visit to Bayreuth with Kay in 2001 to hear the Ring Cycle.

THE RED TRAM (2004)

Acknowledgements: (NZ) A Heady Brew (Café Poems), New Zealand Listener, New Zealand Books, North & South, The Waitakeres: Ranges of Inspiration (Waitakere Ranges Protection Society), The Second Wellington International Poetry Festival Anthology 2004, Sport; (UK) PN Review, Stand, Times Literary Supplement; (USA) Cumberland Poetry Review, Fulcrum; (Italy) Da Ulisse a … La città e il mare dalla Liguria al mondo, ed. Giorgetta Revelli, 2005; (France) the poem ‘Stone Figure’ derives from an entry written for 5000 Ans de Figures Humaines: Cent Regards sur les Collections Barbier-Mueller, Mona Bismarck Foundation, Paris, 2000.

‘The Advance of English – Lang & Lit’: The first poem parodied, Shakespeare’s Sonnet CXVI, was wrongly listed in this collection as Sonnet XXXI, because I looked it up in the Golden Treasuryof Songs and Lyrics, where it is numbered XXXI – the 31st poem in the anthology!

‘Love etc.’: Although I have indicated the Latin and French poems from which this sequence takes its beginnings, they are not simply translations, and in fact I have allowed myself complete freedom. Some are close to the original; some rework similar elements into a different statement; some take off from the original and go in a different direction. None pays any respect at all to the Latin and French forms. The Verlaine is almost close enough to be called a ‘translation’; but then the final two lines are an interpretation of the original rather than part of its text. And both the Verlaine and the Rimbaud are formal sonnets in the French. I stress that although I know French reasonably well and have read quite a lot of French literature, I am no linguist. I am certainly no Latinist. I use these precedent texts to make what I hope I can claim as my own poem, creating my own fictional persona.

‘Rapallo, an economy’ was accompanied, in the Italian anthology acknowledged above, by a note, part of which read as follows:

My first recollection of Rapallo is from 1972 when I lived for eight months in Menton as Katherine Mansfield Fellow. I had driven with my wife and three small children across to Florence and Venice, and on the way back stopped at Rapallo and wandered about hoping I might chance to see Ezra Pound. I might well have been looking in the wrong place, since Pound, in those years, had left his wife Dorothy and was coming and going, between Rapallo and Venice, with his long-time friend Olga Rudge; but at that time I was not as well-informed about Pound’s life as I became later on. He died the following year, 1973.

I returned to Rapallo in 1984, with Kay and our two daughters, and it was then I discovered the famous salita and the climb up to Sant’ Ambrogio and what had been Olga Rudge’s house. The town figured in my novel The Death of the Body, published in London in 1986, and subsequently translated into several European languages (but not Italian).

My next visit was to attend the fifteenth annual Ezra Pound conference and to write a piece about it for the London Magazine (April/May 1994). It was here I met the distinguished Pound scholar Professor Massimo Bacigalupo of the University of Genoa, who has remained a friend. Here also I met Mary de Rachewiltz, Pound’s daughter to Olga Rudge. It was on this visit I conceived the idea for what is the only thriller I have written, Villa Vittoria, published in 1997. It did not make me a large amount of money, as thrillers are supposed to do (very little in fact); but it did arouse the interest of the New Zealand movie director Roger Donaldson, who works in Hollywood, and I wrote a script for it which remains, thus far, only a script. [See the poem ‘Hollywood’ in The Right Thing.]

The novel begins with the unveiling of a bust of a famous (and famously deplored) American pro-fascist poet, Sterling Grant, by his former mistress. Forbidden photographs are taken of the invited guests, revealing that a corrupt banker, supposed dead, may be still alive. Names have been changed but Grant is clearly Pound, and the banker, Roberto Calvi, of the Banco Ambrosiano scandal. The ‘thriller’ takes off from there, and becomes also a love story. Place-names are also changed, but the places are easily recognisable. The Hotel Villa Vittoria, from which the photographs are taken, is based on the Hotel Villa Cristina on the Rapallo seafront.

The same hotel, given its real name, figures in the poem, somewhat derelict, one of its broken shutters ‘banging on’ in the wind, speaking in the first person and representing a long history.

Vagabonda III in section 4 is Professor Bacigalupo’s sailboat, successor to Vagabonda I and II on which Pound was taken sailing from time to time by the Professor’s father who was Pound’s doctor.

The poem speaks in part from the perspective of the New World. Rapallo represents Italy and the ancient culture from which the modern world has emerged, and to which we must return, in the mind or in reality, if we are to understand ourselves. What the broken shutter sees is both significant (armies marching east and west) and insignificant (the violinist – Olga Rudge in fact, as described in her daughter’s account – hitching up her skirts before climbing the salita). What it tells us is something we need to know.

THE BLACK RIVER (2007)

Acknowledgments: (NZ) Dominion Post, New Zealand Listener, Metro, New Zealand Books, Sport; (UK) Guardian, PN Review, Warwick Review.

‘S//CRAPBOOK’: ‘Seven poems each beginning with a line by Colin McCahon’ – With apologies to the shade of Colin, these first lines are taken from Rita: Seven Poems by Colin McCahon, edited by Peter Simpson and published in a very expensive edition of 175 copies by the Holloway Press.

‘Kentucky, 1853’: More than one reader has said he/she feels as if this is familiar territory but can’t quite ‘place’ it. I feel the same. The whole poem, including the very specific title, was a dream – and there was that notebook by my bed to dash it down before it was lost. I feel sure it must have some buried source in my childhood reading, not available to conscious memory – Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, Brer Rabbit, the songs of Stephen Foster, or something else of that kind – or an amalgam. This causes me to reflect that the reading of my childhood, though ‘Dominion’ status hadn’t quite got us out of the colonial frying pan, was not entirely British. I’m aware that the kind of ‘Darkie-talk’ used in the poem – though it must derive from attempts by those Classic American writers to reproduce the actual sounds of English as spoken by Black slaves – is unacceptable these days. But the whole process by which the poem arrived, its peculiarity and particularity, I find interesting – and especially the fact that there is a whole possible (and terrible) fiction potential in it; the sense of a knife-edge being walked by the Black man.

‘History’: The speakers in each section are as follows. They are not indicated in the poem itself because there is in all of them an element of fiction to broaden and generalise the picture.
1 Alberto Moravia
2 Winston Churchill
3 Alberto Moravia
4 Gunner Jim Henderson
5 An official in the Mussolini household
6 Mussolini
7 Olga Rudge, mistress of Ezra Pound
8 The official who speaks in 5
9 Pvte Reg Minter, 24 Btn
10 ‘Captain Valerio’ (the name adopted to conceal the identity of the Resistance assassin)
11 I morti in mezzo ai fiore – the dead among flowers
12 The poet Eugenio Montale to Bernard Wall
13 C.K.S.

‘Part Two, May–June 2005’, was accompanied by the following note:

By way of explanation: In May 2005 I had a ‘migraine’ which proved to be an ischaemic stroke, an event significant only to myself and those close to me, and not for very long (apart from leaving me feeling unsafe), since all the effects were gone within a few weeks. But for a brief time I experienced complete dyslexia; and as the ability to read came back, my anxiety was to find whether I could still write. I kept a small notebook which had on its cover a symbol of a swan in pale paua, and into this I ‘wrote’ – scribbled – (it was like writing in the dark) what I thought were poems, composed in my head. I hope the selection which follows is of more than merely diagnostic interest. They were all written in May–June of that year. Everything in Part One of this collection was written subsequently (July 2005–September 2006).

EARLY UNCOLLECTED POEMS, 1951–61

Most of these had been published in periodicals (as indicated) but were rejected or mislaid when I put together my first collection, Whether the Will is Free; a few others had got no further than typescript.