Review: Say I Do This

Some poets are vatic, others civic. (It’s not a competition; one can admire both.) Vatic poets, prophetlike and linguistically more high-flown, imply they’re in possession of urgent, momentous, possibly dangerous secrets, only to be conveyed cryptically, if at all: “Weave a circle round him thrice, / And close your eyes with holy dread ….” Civic poets write more as fellow-citizens. Their poems respond, in a less strenuous, often witty, manner to life, the universe and everything. A few poets – T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, for instance – start out vatic and later become civic.

C.K. Stead’s new collection, Say I Do This, is a reminder that during his long and fruitful poetic career, he has always been a civic poet, and one of our most lucid and articulate. Horace is the tutelary spirit of civic poets, so it is fitting that the opening poem, To be continued perhaps, is a loose, consciously localised adaptation of Odes 1.11. This is the ode which ends with carpe diem and its exhortation to make the most of our time. Stead, adding a dash of Catullus, renders this as, ‘Forget tomorrow my love. Just live with me today.’

That last line more or less sets the mood and perspective for the three sections which follow: Home, Away, … and Friends. In Home, we never stray far from the Steads’ house in Tohunga Crescent and the ‘life of quiet medication’ he now lives there. These poems record and celebrate the pleasures of the senses and the neighbouring material world: ‘share with me a bottle of Te Mata red’; ‘The sun’s all over everything and the sea / flinches and glitters’; ‘a whiff from the Kohi Café of / breakfast bacon has a hint // of the divine’; ‘there’s cicada / tinnitus making each day / ‘one summer’s’ as if // the start of a short / story.’

Threaded through all this savouring of the immediate are – again very Horatian – persistent tugs of regret. These tug hardest in lines such as ‘a dear one’s imprecations hang over us both’ and “longing for foreign shores, adventure and death.’

The Away section focuses specifically on that ‘longing’ for ‘foreign shores.’ There are reminiscences and dreams of London, Menton, the Côte d’Azur and elsewhere, even in National Anthems the yearning to die over there, as “Borges wished to die // in Geneva / which was ‘nice and / not Argentina’”. This section also contains – another kind of ‘away’ – my favourite poems in the collection, four Psalms of Judas. The Notes remind us of Stead’s 2006 novel, My Name Was Judas, whose hero, contrary to the Gospels, ‘tries to save Jesus from the wrath of the Romans but fails.’ I wasn’t a huge fan of the novel (preferring other fictional reimaginings of the Judas story) but these poems, together with those woven into the novel itself, are as good as Cavafy in his historico-mythico-revisionist vein.

Cavafy does in fact appear in Sonnet in a time of Lockdown.  Both he and Allen Curnow (fondly evoked earlier on) could easily have featured in the third section, … and Friends (after all, Iris Murdoch’s there, John Berryman, too). In the more literal sense of friends, there are touching poems to the living and the dead, literary and otherwise, including Kevin Ireland and Fleur Adcock.

But that’s not to ignore the initial ellipsis in the title to the third section: ‘…’. Stead’s poems (and prose) have often carried a sting – also a civic trait (think of Pope or Byron). That sting is still present, not least in the jolting Keri Hulme – The Bone People: ‘how latitude and boozy glory / combined to make her once-and-ever // the never-back-again front runner.’

There’s also this to say, however: does a collection enlarge the sense of what poetry can be and/or does it encourage readers to write themselves? Say I Do This scores a yes on both counts.

 Reviewed by Harry Ricketts