That Derrida Whom I Derided Died

In his 85th year, C. K. Stead’s new collection leads us deep inside the life of the poet. He looks back at his younger self, remembering old loves and cringing at his ‘sonnets’ lugubrious rhyming’. He tells us of those who have gone – Derrida (‘that Derrida whom I derided died’) and Curnow (‘Allen’s as dead now / as an old friend can be which is / hardly at all), Peter Porter and Lucien Freud. And he takes us along with him on the poetical life: from Dogshit Park in Budapest to a Zagreb bookshop to the Christchurch Festival. The collection includes a series of poems written while the author was poet laureate, including a sequence on World War I in which ‘the Ministry’ requests poems from our reluctant and sometimes defiant poet laureate.