Collected Poems A.R.D. Fairburn

Description

Publisher: Pegasus Press, Christchurch, 1966. This edition: 1975 reprint.
Editor: Denis Glover (with foreword)
Format: Paperback
Condition: Very Good — slight discolouration to pages

Rex Fairburn died of cancer in 1957, aged 53, having never held a job that suited him for long and having written poems that will outlast everyone who ever gave him grief about that. This collection — assembled and prefaced by his friend, fellow poet, and longtime publisher Denis Glover — is the full record of what he left: the short lyrics, the satirical verse, the light and occasional poems, and the three long works that sit at the centre of everything he did.

Dominion, written in 1938 after Fairburn had spent time on Depression-era relief gangs breaking roads, is the one that endures most fiercely — a panoramic, bitter, and at times unexpectedly tender assessment of New Zealand’s colonial inheritance. His biographer called it arguably the most important political poem written in this country. The love lyrics are something else entirely: lucid, direct, and deceptively simple in the way that only the very best poems are. The Cave, A Farewell, Winter Night — poems that carry the whole weight of time and desire in a handful of lines.

The fact that this book was edited by Glover matters. These two men shaped mid-century NZ literary culture from opposite ends of the country, trading letters, arguments, and manuscripts for decades. The foreword Glover wrote for his dead friend is itself a piece of NZ literary history. This 1975 reprint is a hardback without dust jacket, in very good condition — a working copy of a canonical text, ready for a reader who means it.

Why We Stock It:
Fairburn was fourth-generation Pākehā New Zealand — his great-grandfather signed the Treaty of Waitangi — and he spent his whole life trying to write honestly about what that meant, and what this country was, and what it could be. That project is still unfinished. This book is still useful.