Steve Braunias farewells New Zealand poet Kevin Ireland

The late New Zealand writer Kevin Ireland, at his Devonport home. Photo / Paul Estcourt

Opinion

Kevin Ireland was always the funniest person in the room, and probably will be even in death, at the Devonport Public Library on Tuesday night, on the occasion of a posthumous book launch. The very fact of a posthumous book launch is a comedy in itself. The author sends his regrets. He is running late. Late since last Thursday, when he died, aged 89, a life very well lived, the last quarter of a century dedicated to “growing old”, as he liked to put it, “disgracefully”.

Kevin Ireland was Kevin Ireland only in his imagination, the surname taken from a street sign in Ponsonby. He liked the sound of it and ran with it, leaving behind the name he was given by his father. Kevin Jowsey ceased to be. Kevin Jowsey, brought up in Rewhiti St, Takapuna, a child abandoned by his mother, a teenager left to fend off an angry father, was peeled off like a coat he longer wanted. He could now travel light.

Kevin Ireland was famous, a distinguished poet, who served his writing apprenticeship in a shed out the back of Frank Sargeson’s bach in Takapuna in the 1950s, at the same time Janet Frame, too, was a student at the strangest university in New Zealand letters. He brought with him all that literary heritage, a prized relic from another, distant age, and I always probably regarded him as a man out of time, although that was also due to his very courtly manners. Even his moustache was courtly.

Kevin Ireland with his dog Sydney, at home in Devonport. Photo / Richard Robinson

Kevin Ireland was a sub-editor at the Listener and we worked together for several years. It was an office full of backstabbing and frontstabbing, as well as the judicious art of sidestabbing, generally it was very stabby, but he was neither a stabber nor the stabbed. Everyone liked him. Everyone admired him. Everyone knew they would never make art like he made, so exact, so spare, so much out of so little. “Ireland walks the tightrope of his own lines”, Patrick Evans wrote. Ireland wrote,

thin men

write gaunt poems

and each word

sticks out

like a rib

Kevin Ireland liked a drink. He wrote on the occasion of the death of Denis Glover, a shocking and determined lush, “you left the land not only poorer/ but more sober”. Ireland wasn’t in that dark league, was never that manic; he loved his long liquid lunches with literary pals such as Graeme Lay, Bernard Brown, and Peter Bland, and was an imbiber who liked to cook, and paint, and feed the birds, and catch the fish; he had an interesting love life (he met his first wife in Bulgaria, fell in love with her at first sight, later writing he was “hypnotised by sex”); he always credited a teacher at Takapuna Grammar, Phoebe Meikle, for introducing him to Shelley, and lighting that first fire of poetry in his mind. The fire burned brighter than the bottle.

Kevin Ireland met a deer culler in a pub one night and told him his stories would make a great book. He sat him in front of a typewriter in a house in New Lynn, and Barry Crump wrote A Good Keen Man. Ireland’s memoir, A Month At the Back of My Brain, includes a great story about the funeral of a man who was absent in the coffin at his own service: he had already been cremated, but the family felt the need to fill the coffin with something, anything. Ireland writes of guests, “They had just paid their last respects to a corpse composed entirely of about five dozen copies of Woman’s Day.”

Kevin Ireland, too, will be made of paper, at the launch of A Month At the Back of My Brain in Devonport on Tuesday. His wife, Janet Wilson, will read from his work. It’s actually a co-launch: his old friend Karl Stead is launching his new book of poetry, Say I Do This. I interviewed them together a few years ago at Sargeson’s house at 14 Esmonde Rd. They had both had their lives changed there, both had the good fortune of knowing Sargeson when they were young writers. We talked about that time for two hours on a winter’s morning and then we went for lunch. That was a really great day. I have the honour of launching the two books on Tuesday, and raising a toast to the present Mr Stead, and the absent Mr Ireland.