In the Half Light of a Dying Day: Catullus, 2023

In the Half Light of a Dying Day: Catullus, 2023
By C. K. Stead
Review by Claudia

Listen to Claudia’s review on RNZ here.

C. K. Stead, one of our country’s most honoured writers, Emeritus Professor, former Poet Laureate, is back to tread the boards as Catullus. Many out there will know that Stead has written several sequences of Catullus-inspired poems, but never a whole book until now.

Catullus was a Roman love poet from the 1st century BCE, when Augustus was Emperor in Rome. Augustus is remembered by many Classicists as a pragmatist who liked stability in all affairs of state, including marriage. Though long dead, Catullus is an accessible poet for the modern reader because he wrote candidly about love, jealousy, hate and politics. His work continues to be translated and interpreted. You can see how his poetic programme could put him at odds with the emperor of his time, especially because one of his favourite topics was a love affair with a married woman. Historians think her real name was probably Clodia, and Catullus refers to her as Lesbia.

C. K. Stead explains in the preface of this book that he is not so much a translator as a poet who writes “versions in the manner of.” This is how I was first introduced to Stead’s work. I studied Catullus as a Classics student, including ‘The Clodian Songbook,’ from Stead’s Geographies published in 1982. And here in In The Half Light of a Dying Day we have the same formula: ancient love poet, modern context. Enough of Catullus’ poetry has survived that Stead can adopt his literary mannerisms and patterns of speech and confidently imagine himself as a modern Catullus.

Stead himself encourages us in the preface to read this book as “a single work of fiction,” and I think it’s fair to say a reader with some knowledge of Catullus’s poetry is going to get a bit more from this collection – and indeed be able to ask more questions about it – than a reader without that knowledge, but don’t let that put you off. Stead’s work is concise and particular – with the exception of ‘Invocation,’ the first poem in the book, the narrative path of the poem is always clear. What I mean by that is, if you’ve ever gotten a few stanzas into a poem and then thought, “where the hell am I? Is that a sentence? Where are the verbs?”, you won’t have that problem here.

Stead’s tone is frank, and his reference points are modern. In the poem ‘History,’ Catullus ponders “some marvellous posting / in the provinces,” which, to me, catches both the Ancient Roman meaning of being posted as a soldier to some far-off place to guard the empire, and the modern practice of posting online. Ergo, this Catullus could be on Instagram.

Stead also innovates, and introduces the character Kezia into his Catullan drama. Catullus and Kezia have been together for a long time, and in these poems you will find them watching Succession together and wondering at “the language… of the gutter and of the stars,” i.e. all the swearing or “world-soiled words,” as Stead puts it.

At times Stead can’t quite decide on the best verb or adjective, and so leaves the reader with two options – which I could do without. I feel this opinion of mine most acutely in the poem ‘Odi et Amo’ (“I hate and I love”) where Catullus refers to his former mistress Clodia as “time-worn/time-/wasted” thus reminding the reader that a woman is a finite resource who can only get worse over time (lord forbid she could just simply age, as any man does) and the reader needs to understand Clodia is both worn out and wasted. So yes, this Catullus can be a little bitter at times

I won’t pretend to understand all the references to Stead’s contemporaries in these poems, but I think most of us will be able to spot a tribute to Kevin Ireland, and a dig at Baxter titled ‘Hemi’.

Many of the poems in the second half of the book are about Catullus and Kezia experiencing, or coping with, “the claws of the Crab,” i.e. cancer, the cause of Kezia’s suffering and eventual passing. And these poems moved me deeply: to quote from ‘Pain’, “The gods / unhelpful as always / silent, indifferent / are keeping tight about it / doing nothing except / to render you useless / Catullus / with only your box of words to play with / and no new word for despair.”

These poems do a great job of depicting what you do when you don’t know what to do after a bereavement. Catullus talks to his cat, watches movies, has vivid dreams, panics about what to do with Kezia’s belongings – and it’s not a one-note exploration of grief. Even in the final poem of the book, Catullus ponders ending up in a Norse afterlife with “dwarfs banging pots and pans / with threatening precision” while Kezia is somewhere more idyllic. There’s always a thread of good humour somewhere in the mix. The Big Thought that I had concerning this collection: What does the persona of Catullus give Stead licence to do, that he feels he could not do as himself?