Karl Stead is like a grand old sideboard in the dining room of New Zealand literature: well-stocked, stylishly set, scratched in a few places, polished in a lot more, a go-to place for when you want a savoury, occasionally tart dish.
I won't call him prolific; the word suggests glibness, an assembly-line ease. Productive seems a more apposite term, and these 50-plus "reviews, replies and reminiscences" (that second word always brings an intake of breath when it involves CKS), are products of his Afternoon Writing over the past quarter-century. Mornings are reserved for his abundant, often acclaimed fiction and poetry.
"Language is what distinguishes us on our planet," he notes of Homo sapiens, and that language here is considered, lucid, emphatic. If "reading academic writing can sometimes feel like eating blotting paper", Stead's paper is indubitably crisp and white, with the odd scorch mark. You meet the same clarity in the several interview transcripts - and Stead is unfailingly courteous, even with the silly questions, though you can sense those famous mouth corners about to draw down on occasions.
A wide spectrum of Mansfield recollections and analyses includes a timeline of his own preoccupation with her, from Weetbix cards to his 2004 novel. We get Janet Frame's ambivalent, acid reaction to the Menton Fellowship, T. S. Eliot's "distrustful, even apprehensive" attitude, Philip Larkin's admiration.
There's a section of Poet Laureate Blogs. Stead pricks Auden for his faulty grammar; discusses Ezra Pound, deep in the Cantos and in his prison cell; makes a splendidly compact appraisal of Allen Curnow's early "grief ... loss ... deprivation".
