Say I Do This: Poems 2018-2022 - C. K. Stead

A beautiful new collection from this country’s leading poet.

‘It’s hard to renounce life once one is fond of it.’ — Ludwig Wittgenstein

In this poignant new poetry collection, one of this country’s most significant voices reflects on home, on away, and on friends living and dead. ‘I lead a life of quiet medication’, the poet claims, ‘longing for foreign shores, adventure and death.’ But whether swimming to the yellow buoy or remembering an encounter in Belsize Park, in the thick of it or asking, ‘what next?’, Stead’s voice is intimate, amusing and always compelling.

Swimming in the dark I call on memory –
     Rangitoto ahead, and those lights
          of Kohi behind making

a cosy half-circle. Overhead the moon’s
     a waka sailing west to escape
          first light that will put it out.

I’m reaching blind fingers for the yellow buoy
     and touch it only as the sun does
          dimly through a bank of cloud