Table of Contents

ONE: THE YELLOW BUOY, 7 Ego 1, Ego 2, 8 Names, 9-10 Four kinds of love, The end of the affair, Victor, Saying her name, 1951, The yellow buoy, 11 Three to the left, 12 Catullus 68, 13 Catullus receives the ONZ, 14 Ischaemia, 15 - 23 CROATIA, Speaking in bronze, Making it, In Zadar, The stones of Zadar, Field notes, In that moment, When I touched your wrist, Last poem, A letter to Jadranka Pintaric, 24-26 SEXTET Lee Miller's famous foto, Richard Farrell, The emperor's clothes, Halting and Turing, The bond, Dream-rhyme-haiku, 27-28 A/go, 29-30 COLOMBIA Love is a lunatic city, Caracoles gigantes, Last night I dreamed, 31 The Prelude, 32 SOUTH-WEST OF EDEN, The ghost, A la recherche... 33-34 Katherine Mansfield, Isola Bella, Cornwall, May 1916, 35 Waving goodbye, TWO : THE SILENCE. 37-44 Liguria: Before, Midday, Buonanotte, A memory of Valery Larbaud, Sonnet, The eel, Public notice, Sonnet, At the Villa dei Pini, Asterisk, And then..., A Ligurian story, Nella ora agli dei, 45-46 Four versions of motets by Eugenio Montale, 47-50 13 ways of looking at a waltz by Diabelli, 51 Barry, 52-53 Back then (but briefly), 54-57 Venezuela, Tlking book, The return , La casa, Let us build the nation well, Graham Greeneland, 58-60 Nine ways of looking at a fantail, 61 The Maecenas of Lynn, 62 Double sonnet: an owl is seen on Ascension Day, 2009, 63-68 Three poems by Philippe Jaccottet, Late summer nights, Wind-blown fragments, Night notes, 69-70 The crash, 71 The afterlife, 72 Sixes and sevens, 73-75 The gift, 76 The silence, THREE : THE GREEN ENCLAVE, 78 The green enclave, 79 Why poetry? 80 At Bogliasco, 81 Larkin, 82 The dream, 83 Ave atque vale, 84 Malice, 85 The Russian, 86 Of course, 87 Look who's talking, 88 Saluti, 89 Grammaticus, Arletty, 90 End of story, 91 Frank, 92 Lipitor, 93 To a friend..., 94 Where am I/Who am I?, The cloud, Stay alert, Heaven, Migraine, Overnight, In a Catholic country, The thousand year Reich, 98 Has been, 99 The old, 100 The death of Odysseus, 101 The new husband, 102 Curno, 103 Syllabics for Roger Morton, 104 The angel, 105 Names and places poem, 107 Leaving Karekare, 108 Further acknowledgements and notes.

About the Author

Christian Karlson Stead was born in Auckland, New Zealand, in 1932. Internationally, acclaimed, he has published more than forty volumes of fiction, poetry, memoir and criticism. Stead's numerous prizes and honours include the 2009 New Zeland's Prime Minister's Award for Fiction, a 2009 Montana New Zealand Book Award for his Collected Poems, the Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award and the Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine in 2010. Stead was awarded a CBE in 1986

Reviews

It's dusk. The train glides out of the station and soon we're racing through flat snowy fields. The grey sky is streaked with primrose, I open CK Stead's The Yellow Buoy - and I'm hooked. Stead needs no introduction. He's one of our most prolific, versatile and internationally renowned writers. Impressively, this new poetry collection is his 15th, and his contributions to fiction and non-fiction are no less impressive. In light of his publishing record and public honours, it's disarming - and beautiful - to discover the two opening poems are titled Ego 1 and Ego 2. They perfectly contradict each other, staring each other down like well-matched opponents, one denigrating ego, the other affirming it. "Never encourage the Ego", advises the first, while the second states contrapuntally, "Never disparage the Ego". In the first poem, Ego is "a bird with one note", a yapping dog - but the second portrays it as "your surfboard / your sail", the thing that prevents you from drowning. These opposed yet masterfully balanced poems set the tone for a multifaceted collection. Stead's sharp intelligence and academic knowledge are always partnered with a glinting humour, a love of visual imagery and an ability to appreciate - and exploit - both sides of a coin. The Yellow Buoy is divided into three sections, representing five years of experiences and memories. Stead travels widely. His work traverses settings and centuries, from Croatia to France, Colombia to New Zealand. Many are tributes to friends or colleagues: "Hunting for a rhyme / on Lone Kauri Road I met / Allen Curnow's ghost" (Dream-rhyme-Haiku). Such turnings back to the past are clear-sighted and objective - but these qualities never preclude tenderness. The title poem appears early in the book, in the sequence 'Four kinds of love'. "Late in the day our Ovid fell in love / not with a woman but a yellow buoy". That casual claiming of Ovid! It's so perfect - and it's perfectly Stead, as are the last lines with their effortless wordplay: "Ovid avid for copy, whatever / it cost if he could make it a poem." The third section consists of work from the year in which Stead turned 80. It's quizzical, yet also deeply contemplative. The final poem is the pitch-perfect Leaving Karekare, whose imagery of "green-brown" light reflects back to the book's opening, where "wind / beats green waves brown" (Ego 2). The closing lines feel like both homage and elegy. Hoping for acknowledgement from the landscape, the poet is met with silence: 'Don't go,' I want it to sigh, but today there's no wind and not a word is spoken. It's a masterful finish. When I close the book, I'm left with a curious feeling of duality. There's a world outside the sliding windows - and there's one in my hands: complex, complete, captured within two paper covers.