Leicester Kyle: Book Thirty

Leicester Kyle

'It's vanity and not verity that makes a deity'

St. Augustine of Hippo

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NOTES:

The structure of this work was suggested to me by Dante’s La Vita Nuova. I have appropriated some of its elements, such as the supporting framework of the autobiographical story.

At a public performance the work is best read by two voices, with the accompanying photographs projected onto a backing screen.

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Contents:

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Editorial Note

This sequence has been reconstructed from electronic files recovered from Leicester Kyle's computer hard-drive after his death. Unfortunately, as the files were arranged by alphabetical order of title, I have had to rely for the most part on internal evidence to reconstruct a probable order for the 28 poems and 24 short prose pieces called, by him, the "God Poems."

Sometimes the prose pieces - labelled above in italics - cite the poem (or poems) intended to come next directly by title. This is the case with proses 2, 10, 13, 15, 25, 27, 30, 44 and 48 above. In other cases the poem can be deduced by hints about its subject matter: the reference to "wind" in prose 32, for example.

I can't claim to have solved the puzzle definitively. While I think it's probable that Leicester planned to begin his performance of the sequence with the discovery of that old library copy of Auden's Look, Stranger! in a second-hand bookshop in Nelson, before moving back in time to earlier strata of his family history, I can certainly imagine other approaches.

In the absence of more direct proof, though, I thought it best to present the poems in at least one possible chronological order, as I do feel that they build a cumulative power through the narration of this family tragedy.

As with his other posthumous poetry sequence, The Galapagos Tracts, I'm not sure if the work was ever intended for publication, since his own notes (reproduced above) refer solely to a slide-show presentation. The fact that he cites Dante's Vita Nuova as one of his principal influences would seem to imply that he did envisage seeing it in print someday. For myself, I certainly think it sufficiently interesting to merit being reproduced here, despite any uncertainties about its ordering.

Leicester told me enough of his family history over the years for me to recognise this as a fairly accurate (albeit selective) account of the fortunes of the Kyle family from the Great Depression onwards. I don't know if any of the names have been disguised - I suspect some of them may have been. The autobiographical passages in such works as State Houses and Anogramma may also help us to fill in the odd gap in this account of the fall of a family.

The fact that these poems are arranged as a Job-like series of reproaches to God shows - if nothing else - how profoundly important the subject was for Leicester. He must, however, have believed that enough other people would see analogies to their own thoughts and experiences for him to wish to make public so bitter and disquieting a series of events.

- Jack Ross,
Mairangi Bay, February 2012.

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Leicester Kyle

Saturday

Book Thirty

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