Kay and Karl, the old team

My Catullus poems, which have come and gone at intervals over the past half century, have never been translations from the Latin, though some have borrowed; and never ‘confessional poems’, though how close to ‘truth’ and how far from it has always been unclear.  How ‘real’ was my Clodia, who seemed to be derived from the Roman poet’s Lesbia? How real was Catullus himself?  Were these poems autobiography or fiction?

Their recent return, collected in my new book of poems In The Half Light of a Dying Day, began with the intention of being my ‘Catullus as usual’.   Ambiguity in poetry can often irritate those who want ‘the truth’, the no fancy-business ‘facts’, but it’s more likely to please sophisticated readers who see it as a richness of possibility and an invitation to make their own contribution to ‘what the poem means’. But gradually, in this new sequence, real life invaded the narrative. Kay, my wife of nearly 70 years became ill, cancer was confirmed and took its usual ghastly course; but still the new poems went on seeming to write themselves, as if I was taking dictation, and Kay became part of them.  She was not, never had been ‘Clodia’, so I had to give her a new name, Kezia, while Catullus emerged from anonymity and became, unmistakably myself, helping her, reliving our past together, caring for her as her illness grew worse, recording her suffering, her humour and her courage, her extraordinary knowledge – and finally her death and beyond it, when my own life persisted in that shadow.  So she and I emerged in this new sequence as ourselves, Kay and Karl, the old team, on a last literary voyage together.

And yet the Catullus device, the stylistic habit and its rules, by which Catullus never speaks in the first person but is spoken to, or spoken about, persisted, and I believe is the reason for any success the sequence may have. No demands are made: the reader is never invaded. It is the decorum of one who never wanted to be a ‘confessional poet’, and if he has become one, it has been inadvertent, poetry’s doing not mine.

The Silence

In the undertaker’s parlour

today Catullus

you wore your new hearing aids

to listen

beside finely refurbished Kezia

to the Silence.

She lay there

in her plain wood coffin

no more serious than you

but focussed

wearing that dark grey skirt we’d chosen,

red-brown silk scarf,

black trousers and black-shined shoes

so small they touched the heart.

Not a pin was dropped,

not a tear fell:

you and she Catullus

were elsewhere, otherwhere

nowhere.

“The Silence” is taken with kind permission from the new poetry collection In The Half Light of a Dying Day by CK Stead (Auckland University Press, $235), available in bookstores nationwide. The book is a sequence of poems leading to the death of the author’s wife, Kay, in August 2023. All the poems were written in that year of illness and grief. There are memories of James K Baxter and Kevin Ireland, of a long married life “in the lovely gully” of Parnell, of Kay slipping away, of the funeral, of life after death. Throughout, the author appears as Roman poet Catullus, and Kay as Kezia (the name borrowed from Katherine Mansfield). “I think this collection,” he writes in the introduction, “might be read as a single work of fiction.” The author is 92. Auckland writer Anna Jackson commends the book on the back cover and is accurate in describing In The Half Light of a Dying Day as “a late masterpiece”.