120 poems of the ‘Chancy Now’ – ‘still here, getting on, getting away / with things not planned, not prayed for, never promised’

In the 1970s a young professor, I rescued
from a puddle in Princes Street a Penguin

of Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, dried it
and read it, annotating as I went, underlining

his thought that one must have chaos within
if one is to give birth to a dancing star –

At 93, his wife Kay and son Oliver recently dead, writing nothing, C. K. Stead thought there were no more books. Then, ‘alive on pills, / and the surgeon’s knife’, enduring grief and recovery, sonnets began to appear, three or four a week, the poems collected in this volume.

Chaos won’t teach a sonnet to limit its lines
but every sonnet should have its dancing star.

From the ABs under the high ball to Braunias’s lamingtons, from Dionysus to Guide Rangi, from the Uber driver (‘He’s a Wittgenstein man so we get along perfectly / passing over in silence what can’t be discussed’) to the author (‘My Chookspeak’s better than my French because I learned it / in the right way, by ear, not off the page’), 120 sonnets reveal a poet battered, bruised and still in his prime.

After a sonnet tending to self-pity and crap
I consign it to the bin and set off knowing

today’s wild northerly wind and rough seas
at Kohi will knock me into shape. 

Author

C. K. Stead is a distinguished, award-winning novelist, literary critic, poet, essayist and emeritus professor of English at the University of Auckland. He was the 2015–2017 New Zealand Poet Laureate, has won the Prime Minister’s Award for Fiction and is a Member of the Order of New Zealand, the highest honour possible in New Zealand. The Chancy Now is his twentieth book of poetry.

Endorsements

‘If we were able to talk comfortably of an Australasian literature, rather than its Australian and New Zealand sub-branches, then C. K. Stead would be regarded as one of the dominant writers of the past half century . . . a towering talent, cosmopolitan, lucidly intelligent. Few writers on either side of the Tasman have matched Stead’s multi-faceted achievement.’
— Peter Pierce, Sydney Morning Herald

‘Stead writes the way Torvill and Dean skate. He makes it look so easy you don’t realise until afterwards that very few people can put together such luminous sentences.’

— Iain Sharp, Sunday Star-Times

‘Edgy and lyrical, acerbic and witty, intellectually incisive but also visceral and bawdy, disarmingly direct and often intricately plotted, international in focus but always grounded in the country of his birth, the poems and novels are always provocative, always challenging and, above all, always pre-eminently readable.’

— Professor Andrew Bennett, University of Bristol, on the 2001 award of an Honorary Doctorate in Letters to C. K. Stead

‘Few poets can aspire to the combination of intelligence, lyricism, passion and honesty that are the hallmarks of Karl Stead’s work. Born in New Zealand, Stead is revealed by his poetry as an intuitive, thoughtful and sensually responsive vagabond of the world, one whose rare gift it is to inhabit the moment – be it past or present – and bring it, burning, into life. He is a poet who can speak, not to one country, but to us all.’

— Miranda Seymour

‘The clarity is exceptional. Very few poets can strip their art down to this essential music.’

— Peter Crisp, New Argot