Contents

Whether the Will is Free: Poems 1954–62

And could he now …

Night Watch in the Tararuas

While down the fleeces of our sky …

Letter to R. R. Dyer

Three Imperatives in White

Letter to Frank Sargeson

À la recherche du temps perdu

Four Minute Miler

Letter to Eve in London

Four Harmonics of Regret

Whether the Will is Free

Last Poem in Australia

Dialogue on a Northern Shore

Address to Two Cats

Pictures in a Gallery Undersea

Poem to Suppose the Bird

Mind Your Fingers

A Natural Grace

Of Two who have Separated

The Fijian Police Band Performs in Albert Park, Auckland

Crossing The Bar

One: You Have a Lot to Lose

You Have a Lot to Lose

Night Flight, San Francisco–New York

A Small Registry of Births and Deaths

Crossing the Bar

With a Pen-Knife

Three Caesarian Poems

Letter to the Enemy

Lucifer Dictates his Reply

Meeting of Cultures

Two: Putting it Straight

The Albert Park Fountain

Putting it Straight in London

A Reading at the Globe Theatre

On the Publication of Frank Sargeson’s Memoirs of a Peon

My Friend Julius

To W. H. Auden on his 60th Birthday

Lines Concluding a Lecture on Poetry and Criticism

What Will it Be?

Quesada: Poems 1972–74

Northamptonshire Notes

The Mirabeau Bridge

Fifteen Letters from the Zebra Motel

For a Children’s L.P.

Walking Westward

Caesar is still Caesar

Breaking the Neck: an Autumn Sketchbook

Twenty-two Sonnets

These white flowers

Walking Westward

Geographies

Scoria: A Reconstruction

Yes T.S.: A Narrative

The Clodian Songbook: 15 Adaptations

At Home: Weathers and Coastlines

A Poem called ‘The Weather in Tohunga Crescent’

A Warm Wind from the East

A Coastline and Two Facts

St Francis at Karekare

This May be Your Captain Speaking

from Poems Of A Decade

Workshop Cinquains: What am I?

Three Adjustments to the Atomic Clock

After the Wedding

The Magic Bagwash

As if Nothing had Happened

Two Dates for the Auckland Calendar

Deconstructing the Rainbow Warrior

Paris: the End of a Story

The Poetry Room

Going to Heaven

From the Clodian Songbook

The Radiant Way

1820 The Missionary

18 October 1836 The Catechist

1840 The Treaty

5 February The Girl

5 February The Printer

6 February The Printer

8 February The Settler

9 February The Chief

15 April The Governor

21 May The Governor

1848 The Radical

1849 The Settler

1860 The Pakeha-Maori

1860 The Soldier

1864 The Warrior

12 April The Raid

14 April The Colonel

24 January 1884 The Visit

1889 The Gentleman

1889 The Empire

1908 The Actress

1915 August The Commanding Officer

1917 The Mother

Cornwall 1918 The Expatriates

1925 The District Nurse

1929 The Immigrant Artist

1932 The Student

1939–45 The War

1940 The Wife

1941 The Soldier

1942 The Wife

1943 The Soldier

1945 The Soldier

1945 The Explanation

1945 The Anniversary

1947 The Orchestra

1951 The Wharfie

Christmas 1953 The Queen

Rome 1960 The Athlete

1971 The Revolution

31 August 1974 The Private Secretary

25 July 1981 The Clergyman

10 July 1985 The Secret Agent

1990 At the Grave of Governor Hobson

Straw Into Gold

1 Angel, L.A.

2 The Traveller

3 Phoenix, Arizona

4 Moving East

6 ‘It is only at the hour of darkness that the owl of Minerva descends’

7 I’ve seen the future and it’s O.K.

2 Ode to Emptiness

3 The Invitation

4 Honoris Causa

5 Dogs I (Society of Authors)

6 Dogs II (Calvus replies)

7 Soror, Aue atque Uale

9 Si quicquam cupido optantique …

3 The real thing

4 Angel, 1959

3 Kendrick Smithyman (1922–95)

4 Jealousy: Katherine Mansfield, April 1920

5 Jealousy: Virginia Woolf, January 1923

6 Rupert Brooke (1895–1915)

7 Robert Graves (1895–1985)

8 Old ‘G’

A Discursive Poem about Poetry and Thought

Treasure Island

The Right Thing

The Right Thing

Janet Frame’s House

Les Enfants du Paradis

Ode to a Nightingale

John Cage at Harvard

September, Périgord

Running in Oxford

The Keys of the Kingdom

Loyalty and Booze

Suffenia the Poet

Ravidus the Bookman

The Other Place

Revisiting Bristol

Fame and Companion

i Cogito Ergo Sum

iii Lost in space

Lessons in Modern History (i)

Lessons in Modern History (ii)

Even Newer English Bible

5 Miroslav Holub in Toronto, 1981

6 Oxford, 1997

7 Night Sequiturs

8 Isambard Kingdom Brunel – Bristol, 1830

9 St John’s College Library, Oxford

3 The Memory in Stones

7 He learned …

8 In the Clearing

9 Headstones, Suda Bay

10 Veterans, 1998

12 Blitzkrieg

14 At the Villa Andromeda

15 Hotel Lucia

17 Last Post, Suda Bay

I King’s Lynn & the Pacific

The Music Master

The Captain’s Servant

In Principio …

II Creation etc.

Gotland Midsummer

i The Annunciation

ii The Death of God

iii A Note on Sectarian Conflict

viii Philosophy

Poetry and Philosophy

To Karl Miller at 70

Shapely Fact Number Poem

On Turning Seventy

Even Newer English Bible (2)

III At Wagner’s Tomb

i Nietzsche – the Mistake

ii Ludwig II – the Younging

iii Wagner – Dog

iv Hans von Bülov

v Wagner & Cosima: Liszt

vi Nietzsche – the Renunciation

vii Joseph Rubinstein – the Pianist

viii Cosima – Wagner

The Red Tram

The Season, Tohunga Crescent

Legs: an Acknowledgement

The Tree: a Story

History: the Horse

That fear makes killers

True Tales from Ovid

The Advance of English – Lang and Lit

Africa: an Autobiography

Horae Secularae

1 Lone Kauri Road

Ode to the Eight Immortals

My Fellow Writers at Eaglereach

Letter from the Mountains

Rapallo: an Economy

1 Fragment XXXI (Sappho), poem LI (Catullus)

2 Ode I/iv – to Venus (Horace)

3 ‘My Recurring Dream’ (Verlaine)

4 Poem LXXVI (Catullus)

5 ‘The Portrait’ (Baudelaire)

6 Elegy II/xiii (Propertius)

7 ‘Evening at the Green Café’ (Rimbaud)

The Black River

The Art of Poetry (i)

Three Poems from the Languedoc

2 Talking to Bill

Into Extra Time

Agent Arc-en-Ciel

The Art of Poetry (ii)

Remembering Anactoria

Black River Blues

La Sainte Famille

My Sister and M.S.

Versions of Two Poems by Victor Hugo

My Father (a fantasy)

The Art of Poetry (iii)

S – T – R – O – K – E

Some Early Uncollected Poems, 1951–61

Feuilles d’automne

Sonnet for a New Zealand Soldier Killed in Korea

That Particular Morning

Logging, Mangawhai

‘Like to a vagabond flag …’

Shelley looks to the future

Noviciate Sonnet

Lord Gannet, Mrs Shag

Homage to Ancestors

Afternoon with Piano

Afternoon with Violin

A New National Anthem

Index of First Lines

By the Same Author