Travels with writer Kevin Ireland

At 69, poet and writer Kevin Ireland only gets better. He tells PENELOPE BIEDER his formula for nourishing the soul through friendship, adventure, and fly-fishing.

On a brilliant Indian summer day the garden of Kevin and Caroline Ireland's cottage in Devonport is a peaceful place to reflect on a lifetime of writing and travel.

A bowl of reddening peppers grown from seeds from Frank Sargeson's vegetable patch of 20 years ago sits on the veranda table. Sydney, a young Australian terrier-cross, is chasing reflections while his owner searches for his battered panama hat.

Inside, the cottage matches its flourishing garden - every room is crammed with wonderful paintings, bulging bookcases, antiques (Caroline's former business) and collections of sculpture, porcelain and glass.

It's easy to see that they both made the right choice to move here in 1985 after 25 years in London. But after a lifetime's wandering, Kevin Ireland feels he hasn't travelled very far. "The wildest, farthest and most illuminating journeys I have ever undertaken have always been in the pages of books of the imagination."

Ireland may be turning 69 in a couple of months, and he may ruefully declare that everyone else seems to be getting younger, but it is hard to believe that this animated, entertaining man with the slow ironic drawl is approaching his eighth decade. His long, elegant frame settles into a wicker chair and soon he is telling another good yarn, punctuated by delighted chuckles.

"Age creeps up on you insidiously," he explains. "Golly, I retired from full-time employment in my 50s because I realised I would never get my books written. Ever since, I feel I've never worked so hard in my life.

"What's really happened is that I've slowed up a lot and everything takes more time. Busyness is really sheer inefficiency, and a good thing too. Otherwise old people like me would be filling the bookshelves and the young would never get a look in."

There is a wicked twinkle in his eye.

"Another of the deceptions of age is that you think all your work is better, whereas it's much more likely that your standards are slipping."

We pause for a good laugh. Hang on. This from the acclaimed poet who won a Montana New Zealand Book Prize in his 60s for volume one of his memoirs, Under the Bridge & Over the Moon. Am I being teased?

"You may think you know so much more, but it's because you've forgotten so much - and you've always got room to pack away more information to forget.

"We're lucky this process takes place or we would be driven nuts by all those extraneous facts."

Luck and lunacy are two words Ireland is fond of, especially on the eve of the publication of the second volume of his memoirs, Backwards to Forwards.

Luck to him is escaping serious illness, major injuries, war, famine, pestilence and plague.

He leans forward. "One's duty, however, is not to feel you are the Lord's anointed, but that you do have to attempt to pay back a little of the good fortune you have received. I hope I do that by trying not to make the world a worse place for people to live in by being greedy or stupid.

"And I do have a conviction that by trying to record my feelings about the times I have lived in, I may have created something that will at the very least amuse, and occasionally at the best, illuminate."

Lunacy is his favourite word for mad politicians, crazy ideas and misguided causes. His memoir is built from impressions, conversations, stories and poems, and its vague focus is a trip to Eastern Europe that he took by chance in 1959.

I RELAND'S great gift is that he still finds every day as fascinating as he did in his youth. His laidback, almost roue-like charm conceals an intense regard and fondness for the world and for people he has met.

While he acknowledges happily his good fortune, he doesn't believe he simply waited for it to drop into his lap.

"The great adventures should happen in your 20s, but they should also keep on happening for the rest of your life."

As a young man accidentally living in Bulgaria it seemed as if something sensational happened every day. Intense, enduring friendships were made and it was the start of a career which would result in 14 volumes of poetry (the latest, Fourteen Reasons for Writing, published this year), three novels, one collection of short stories, and a huge amount of incidental writing, including the published libretto for an opera performed on BBC Radio which was chosen as its entry in the Prix d'Italia.

In Bulgaria he met and married his first wife, actress Donna Marinova, a passionate relationship that lasted 10 years and brought him into contact with Bulgarian intellectuals, painters and writers who used his London flat as a refuge.

He perfected the art of friendship and adopted a peaceful, more ordered life in Maida Vale with his second wife, Englishwoman Caroline (whose minimal presence in the memoir might be for reasons of privacy). Their home was a haven for New Zealanders, some outstaying their welcome by a month or two.

"One of the recipes for friendship is enthusiasm. I don't think many people successfully create cool friendships," he says. "That's what I call acquaintanceship. You are sometimes pleased to see an acquaintance - you are always overjoyed to see a friend."

And he doesn't think you have to work at friendships.

"A real friendship you can take down from the shelf, dust off and use once a year. It's exactly the same size, shape and weight as it ever was. It does not waste away from neglect because you always have friends in mind."

He thinks another old saw about friendships is also wrong - they do not get harder to forge as you get older.

"It's just as easy as taking a meal and just as nourishing to make new friends. In fact, is as easy as fresh air - all you have to do is open the door."

With this breezy outlook, Kevin Ireland easily walked into a job on The Times in London, where he worked for 20 years. He had seen that working on newspapers and magazines could possibly provide the perfect bolthole for his writing.

"In the last days of hot metal printing, before the advent of the computer, there was a space for people like myself doing rather odd and largely unspecified jobs.

"Printing houses were still very Dickensian and of all the ones I had anything to do with, The Times seemed to me as though it could only have been dreamed up by the pen of that great Victorian novelist. Its working practices and the people who worked there seemed to me at times to recreate the worlds of Bleak House, Our Mutual Friend and A Christmas Carol."

"I wrote several books at The Times and it confirms my declaration that I've always been a full-time writer in an unconventional and surreptitious way. I was the only poet on the payroll.

"Finally, they paid me a handsome redundancy package to clear off and I've always believed that the era of Dickens really ended about then. I left everyone else to the mercy of those new-fangled computers and to the truly scary Rupert Murdoch."

After Ireland left, everyone was on strike and many were subsequently fired.

T HE luck he swears by had him returning more often to New Zealand. In 1985 he accepted a Fellowship for 1986 at Canterbury University. He remains appreciative.

"These writers' fellowships enable people to make a soft landing, perhaps in middle age, while they are having a stab at getting established as a writer."

Though he was away for 25 years, Ireland published here all the time, and never ceased to regard himself as a New Zealand writer, something that Frank Sargeson had instilled in him. "Sargeson said, 'Writers always come from somewhere and they are always recognised by their acknowledged allegiance to the place they have come from'."

It has been true for Ireland. It was this prime self-definition that kept him going in a kind of self-imposed exile. The other deciding factor to return to New Zealand was his remarkable editor Robin (Bob) Dudding, the legendary editor of literary periodicals Mate, Landfall and Islands, who published almost everything he ever sent him over those 25 years.

Ireland remembers vividly staying the night at Dudding's backyard bach in Mt Eden after a party at Bob Lowry's. In the morning from their bunks where they were both nursing large hangovers, Dudding said to him: "It's all right for you, you've decided what you are going to do. You're going to be a poet. But I want to be involved in writing and I don't know what I'm going to do."

"I replied with one of those blinding insights that can come from drinking too much beer, plus the brash confidence of a 20-something-year-old with a headache. 'Well, Charles Brasch can't go on forever. Why don't you become New Zealand's next great editor?' To my everlasting astonishment and benefit, that's exactly what he did."

W HEN Ireland did return home he joined Pen, the writers' organisation, and became politically active.

"Pen is there to help to secure writers' freedoms - not only the right to publish, but the right to dissent and freedom from jail," he says. "We take our freedom here for granted, but writing can get you killed in many countries."

Ireland felt that Pen New Zealand needed to be defined more honestly, and he is satisfied that this has happened. As well, the organisation under the aegis of the New Zealand Society of Authors has more publishers and writers.

"It is not in opposition to publishers, it's not a trade union situation," he says. "It's a symbiotic relationship. Writers and publishers need each other." Today Ireland is hard at work on another book, only pausing to go for a stroll on the beach with Sydney, the dog, or fishing in Central Otago, which has become "a condition of the heart, a territory of the mind" for the writer. Fly-fishing there with friends has provided him with "some of the truly sensational moments" of his life after which he returns home to the cottage by the sea where his wife has created a haven - a source of intense, daily pleasure.

A place where he can continue to reason with "castaway memories and stranded words".