CK Stead commemorates the centenary of Allen Curnow’s birth with a poem

The current issue of the London Review of Books (30 June 2011) has published a poem by CK Stead to commemorate the centenary of Allen Curnow’s birth.

 Stead began writing for the LRB under the editorship of Karl Miller, the paper’s founder.  Miller was Professor of English at University College London in 1977 when Stead was there as an honorary fellow and visiting lecturer.  Stead introduced Miller to Curnow’s work and wrote about it for the paper, after which Curnow (pic left by Marti Frielander) became a fairly frequent contributor of poems, and this continued after Mary-Kay Wilmers, second in command under Miller, moved into the editorial chair.  (Miller figures, incidentally, in an amusing piece by Andrew O’Hagen in the previous issue, 16 June, describing a tour of Scotland O’Hagen made with Miller and his old friend Seamus Heaney.) 

Stead’s new poem (in 13-syllable tercets), ‘The Gift’, evokes memories of Curnow when the two first knew one another as student and lecturer in the 1950s, and goes up to the launch, fifty years later, of Curnow’s last book, The Bells of St Babel’s, at Elizabeth Caffin’s house overlooking the same inner harbour scene that Curnow looked out on from the ‘small room with large windows’ of his first Auckland home in Bayswater. In between comes Tohunga Crescent, where Curnow and Stead were neighbours for three decades, and Lone Kauri Road at Karekare on Auckland West Coast, where both had baches.  

The Gift

C.K. Stead

Brasch in his velvet
voice and signature
purple tie

complained to his
journal that you had
‘interrupted’.

I wasn’t sorry.
That was Somervell’s
coffee shop

nineteen-fifty-three.
Eighteen months
later you and I

were skidding on the
tide-out inner-
harbour shelvings

below your house
from whose ‘small room with
large windows’ you saw

that geranium ‘wild
on a wet bank’
you suggested

was ‘the reality
prior to the
poem’. Son of

Christchurch and the
church you’d come north
to be free perhaps,

to be employed and
in love, and were
making the most

of it in poems that
gave to old ‘summer’
new meanings.

Ten years ago
we launched your last
book, The Bells of St

Babel’s, overlooking
that same inner
harbour with

its shallow bays
and touch-and-go
tides. You wrote in

my copy (sure I
wouldn’t have
forgotten the source)

‘To Karl, always
“somewhere in earshot”.’
What you left out

was ‘for the story’s
end’. You must have
guessed it was close.

Today no end
to your occupation
of the bland

Waitemata
nor of wild
Karekare where we

shared Lone Kauri
Road. The pipe across
Hobson Bay is

replaced by a
tunnel. Tohunga
Crescent has some

new polish but
nothing you would
deplore. The tuis

still quote you
and even cicadas
manage a phrase

that sounds like yours.
Storms too in wooden
houses sometimes

creak of you. But
this ‘blood-noon breathless’
Auckland summer

is the season you
gave us in making
it your own.