The Chancy Now

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.