The black river / C.K. Stead.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Stead, C. K. (Christian Karlson), 1932-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Families--Poetry.

Families.

Genre:

Poetry.

Physical Description:

78 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Auckland, N.Z. : Auckland University Press, 2007.

Summary:

In May 2005 Karl Stead suffered a stroke which left him briefly dyslexic and innumerate but otherwise unaffected. During the days that followed he composed a series of short poems in his head, scribbling them into a notebook kept by his bed, 'as if writing in the dark'. In a few weeks he was completely recovered and went on - in a period of just over a year - to write the poems that make up this, his fourteenth collection.

The poems are in some ways darker than any he has written before, apprehensive, death-possessed, but still with his characteristic mix of wit, cool realism and affectionate levity. Dead family members - the mother who 'never looked back', the father imagining himself Odysseus expecting 'his men' to come for him at any moment, the grandfather (did he row for Oxford?), the sister with MS who laughed so much he feared she would fall out of her wheelchair - are brought to life, together with a whole department of former colleagues, and even the mysterious Anactoria caught sight of for a moment in the House of Death.

Images of the part of France he knows best are here, together with a long disquisition on Mussolini's Italy, and the inevitable poems of swimming and Auckland. This is a poet looking very steadily, very calmly, at life, and at the life the dead seem to possess, in poems which reveal again the technical mastery several of his fellow poets have acknowledged, and the quality of clarity, of 'clear light', he has made his own.

Contents:

The Art of Poetry (i) 3

Auckland 4

Oxford 6

Three Poems from the Languedoc

1 St Maximin 7

2 Talking to Bill 8

3 Curtailed 9

Four Poems 11

Into Extra Time 15

Elegy 17

The Rower 20

S//crapbook 22

Agent Arc-en-Ciel 29

The Art of Poetry (ii) 30

Remembering Anactoria 31

Theology 34

Black River Blues 36

Kentucky, 1853 37

Free Will 38

Embarrassment 39

La Sainte Famille 44

History 46

My Sister and M.S. 59

Versions of Two Poems / Victor Hugo 61

My Father (a fantasy) 62

C.K. 63

The Art of Poetry (iii) 65

S-T-R-O-K-E 69.

Notes:

Poems, some previously in journals.

ISBN:

9781869403850

1869403851

OCLC:

125415434

Online:

Contributor biographical information

Publisher description