Böcker av C. K. Stead

In this poignant new poetry collection, one of New Zealand'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.'This Side of Silence resounds with intimations of mortality, compounded with reactions to a contemporary world of pandemic, climate change and war, but this collection is not in the least morose. Rather, the poetry is enlivening - concrete, particular, detailed and often playful. There is a wealth of sensory content, and each poem has its own satisfying shape, with easy idiomatic speech forming its special kind of rhythm. In this book a major modern poet continues to "live and sing".' - MacDonald P. Jackson'Stead has his usual quick wit and steely eye for his world and, at 90, has the linguistic dexterity that many thousands of aspiring writers can only dream about.' - Chris Reed, NZ Booklovers

Having left the university to write full-time at the end of volume two, Stead throws himself into his work. In novels like Sister Hollywood and My Name Was Judas, criticism in the London Review of Books and the Financial Times, poetry and memoir, Stead establishes his international reputation as novelist, poet and critic. It is also a period when Stead's fearless lucidity on matters literary and political embroil him in argument – from The Bone People to the meaning of the Treaty to the controversy over a London writer's flat.What was it like to be Allen Curnow's designated ‘Critic across the Crescent'; or alternatively to be labelled ‘the Tonya Harding of NZ Lit'? How did poems emerge from time and place, sometimes as naturally as ‘leaves to a tree', sometimes effortfully? And how did novels about individual men and women retell stories of war (World War II, Yugoslavia, Iraq) and peace?Covering Stead's travels from Los Angeles to Liguria, Croatia and Crete to Caracas and Colombia, as New Zealand poet laureate and Kohi swimmer, What You Made of It takes us deep inside the mind and experience of one of our major writers – and all in Stead's famously lucid ‘story-telling' prose.

The Yellow Buoy is CK Stead's fifteenth collection of poetry, in which the writer journeys in time and space from Croatia and Colombia to Karekare and the Cote d'Azur

A striking new collection of accessible yet elegant stories from literary giant and master craftsman C.K. Stead

A beautifully written literary page-turner from one of the great New Zealand writers, recent NZ poet laureate C. K. Stead

"Will appeal to lovers of the wayward novel game as it is played by Lawrence Sterne or Italo Calvino" - Jackie Wullschlager, Financial TimesProfessor Harry Butler is obsessed with the Mind/Body problem.

The three years in the life of the writer Katherine Mansfield explored in this novel are in part the story of the ups and downs of her relationship with Jack Middleton Murry and her struggle to write the "new kind of fiction" which she felt the times demanded.

The wider world beckoned from the white ships sailing past Rangitoto Island, but the dream was also here on the Takapuna shoreline of Auckland, where the artist Melior Farbro grew his vegetables and let Cecilia Skyways follow her own form of Zen Buddhism in his garden hut.

We all know the story of Jesus told by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, but what about the version according to Judas?In this witty, original and teasingly controversial account, some forty years after the death of Jesus, Judas finally tells the story as he remembers it.