Mark Richards – poet, writer, teacher, sailor, musician – died peacefully at home on Waiheke last Sunday. He was 87. Shortly before his death, he had his thirteenth collection of poetry published. Julianne Evans finds out about the man

An elderly, white-bearded man made his way up the ramp to Gulf News a week or two ago, holding a book of poetry. He was hoping to catch the editor who wasn’t in so he got me instead. This was poet Mark Richards, aged 87. And the handsome book represented a selection of his best poems from 1985 – 2008, published by the reputable publishing house Steele Roberts in Wellington.  

I think I was rushing to finish something else and he was eager to be on his way so I took a couple of not very good photographs, had a brief chat and promised I would be in touch about a feature.

Sadly, the opportunity to talk further to the man himself has passed because he died last weekend. There is a lesson about procrastination in that somewhere. However, after looking through the poems, I felt inspired to call his son Hugh (also a longtime island resident) and ask if it would still be appropriate to write something about Mark Richards and his book.  

It is fat - not a slim volume at all.  An extraordinary achievement in the last quarter of his life. The book’s foreword is by New Zealand writer David Hill who notes that “the poems in this collection are vigorous, varied, quickened by verbal and intellectual energy and discoveries, just like their author.”

And looking at poet Kevin Ireland’s brief biography at the front, it’s clear that Mark Richards was no passive observer of life as it passed by.

Born in London in 1922, he was the grandson of the novelist, poet and essayist Maurice Hewlett.  He arrived in New Zealand in 1927 with his parents, who farmed near Tauranga before moving to the North Shore in 1933. After an apprenticeship, interrupted by five years in the army and airforce, he became a journeyman printer on the NZ Herald. After attending Auckland Teachers College 1949-51, he graduated from the University of Auckland in 1954, then went on to teach at Takapuna Grammar School until 1977. He became friends with poets A.R.D Fairburn and R.A.K Mason, who deeply influenced his writing and he published early poems in Arena, a quarterly literary journal based in Wellington.

In 1960, he won first prize for his poem Go Back Lazarus in the Cheltenham Festival Poetry Competition, which at that time, says Ireland, was arguably the most prestigious international prize awarded to a New Zealand poet. And for the next ten years his poems, plays (mainly in verse) and talks were frequently broadcast. His books of poems were regularly published from 1958 to the present and his satirical history of New Zealand, 1840 and All That came out in 1991.

From 1996, he developed an interest in detective novels, creating a character called Simon Bridger who stars in three published novellas as an amateur detective helped by his friends. Oh and he married and had three children (and grandchildren and great grandchildren) along the way -  Michael, Hugh and Barbara.

His poems range across a broad canvas from war and ageing to personal relationships, visions of the future, sailing and landscapes, particularly around the North Shore of Auckland and the Hauraki Gulf. In form they are also varied – from sonnets to narrative to free verse.  I find his writing honest, wry and accessible – intelligent without being pompous.  He is especially unflinching about the ageing process;

Eighty-Five

and tentatively alive

with one heel grazed

by the swing of His scythe

I stand unstable, bedazed

With this permit to survive

Death passed by in nightmares

three I can recall, before

the heart took up the load

reluctantly, to do a little more,

make these lines, be here.

I’ve got no breath to strive

snail-slowly on to anywhere:

sitting still to look at trees

with birds to dance the air

will do for eighty-five.

( page 172, Collected Poems II, 1985-2008)

This is Mark Richard’s tribute to the women, some of whom were from Waiheke, went to protest against nuclear weapons at Greenham Common in the UK in the 1980s.

For the women of Greenham Common

(The US missiles were removed 3rd and 4th August, 1989)

No common women:

cold, wet, assaulted and insulted,

accused, imprisoned, finally ignored,

you hung on at the wire,

the guarded gates that men erect

to hide their lethal follies.

They’d hoped brutality and the weather

Would wear you down  -

public indifference and acceptance,

like your worn grey blankets,

would chill passion, dampen rage.

But eight years on you saw

the missiles all roll away.

History, written in a warm, dry study

By old, dry men long after,

will talk of a climatic change

of attitudes, cite the Gorbachev initiative

and Regan’s final B-grade credits.

You may rate a footnote

With a magisterial sneer:

“Emotional, dramatic protests like these

have no significant effect on international affairs.”

You were one good cause

of that climatic change:

comfortable men and women

round this warring planet

felt your emotion, were  audience

at your drama – see now barbed wire,

gates and guards protecting

hidden arsenals with uour

tired, triumphant eyes.

(Page 71-72, Collected Poems II. 1985 – 2008)

David Hill concludes at the end of his foreword. “These are poems of craft as well as art… They fit together nicely, as do the boats, homes and music the author has shaped in his eventful life. They’re strong, well-wrought, and written with respect and awareness. They and their maker have done a damn good job.”

Couldn’t have put it better myself.

Julianne Evans

A memorial gathering for family and friends of Mark Richards will be held at a later date. See the death notice at the back of this week’s Gulf News.