Description
Book SynopsisIn 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
Trade Review'Say I Do This 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)
