C. K. Stead is New Zealand's most distinguished living poet. Since publishing his first poems in periodicals like Landfall in the early 1950s, he has experimented with many forms and modes – from open form, free verse, journal composition, quotation and found text to personal lyric, translation and imitation – while always bringing a strong personality, deft craftsmanship and a background of realism to bear on his poetry. This Collected Poems includes the work of his fourteen volumes of poetry, from his first collection, Whether the Will is Free, to The Black River of 2007. In addition, it reprints 22 early previously uncollected poems that date from 1951 to 1961. Annotated by the author, the Collected Poems illustrates more than fifty years of the range and ambition of Stead's verse, in which the world always looks 'hard / at the word and the / word at the world'.
