Vale, Iain Sharp

2026-02-24 - 16:06

Iain Sharp and I were somewhat uneasy friends in the English Department at Auckland University in the early 1970s. We both regarded the lecturers in that department with a mixture of envy, admiration and feigned disdain. We regarded each other with similar ambivalence. We came from adjacent backgrounds in Auckland’s burgeoning suburbs, he from Ellerslie and me from the inscrutable boundary where Remuera lapsed into Greenlane. We sat in the same lecture halls, and discussed with exaggerated scorn some of the lecturers and others with craven admiration. We imagined ourselves as one day among that glamorous profession. The English Department was indeed glamorous in those years, with lecturers who delivered resounding leftist diatribes in paisley shirts purchased, it was said, each year in London, mild disquisitions on mediaeval poetry, and the beginnings of ‘theory’, the rage for incomprehensibility that would overwhelm the once genteel practice of reading and interpreting English literature from the Gawain Poet to Sylvia Plath. Each of us relied on a theatrical contempt to cover his own uncertainties. But Iain displayed a measured mixture of disdain for the more theatrical of our teachers coupled with enthusiasm for the eccentric and obscure byways of literature they taught. His strength as a critic was already evident in a discrimination often so withering that his expressions of contempt for some woeful would-be poet like myself were as exhilarating as they were painful. Fifty odd years after we walked the streets of upwardly mobile Auckland, Iain and I found ourselves retired and living in Nelson, roughly the same distance apart as that between Ellerslie and Greenlane. In the interval Iain had translated a boutique reputation for clever poetry and severe critique into a widespread respect, even among those subject to his truculent honesty. The engine of his rising literary esteem was his criticism, which could be brilliantly cruel, but was invariably smart, knowing and crisp. His pugnacity was signalled in the title of his doctoral thesis on Jacobean drama, Wit at several weapons: a critical edition. Yet traces of his kindness and consideration, his fundamental likability were not wholly absent from his judgments. As well as working with newspapers and magazines Iain continued publishing volumes of poetry, and he became the manuscripts librarian in the Special Collections department of the Auckland City Library. He especially remembered there having to explain to a school visit who the bloke with nails through his hands in a mediaeval manuscript was. Still writing critical pieces in magazines, he also dredged deeply into the archives of New Zealand writing, in particular into the narrative of the life and accomplishments of the colonial explorer, Charles Heaphy, resulting in his major work, Heaphy: Explorer, Artist, Settler. In retirement he enjoyed giving lectures on Heaphy to old folks in the Nelson retirement circuit. Iain’s politics, grounded in his Scottish background, were present not so much in a grumpy outrage towards the rich and privileged but in a genuine openness and appreciation of the many marginal characters seeking to survive, if not live comfortably, as a writer. He was hail fellow, well met to those precariously on the edges of literary recognition, and sympathetic to the limitations of bohemian life. He inhabited appreciatively the various strata of literary life, from august literary professors to the small press of Michael O’Leary, the splendidly self-titled Earl of Seacliff. Scrupulous in his judgements, sometimes cruel to the earnest poetaster, he valued the place of the eccentric and the outsider in a minutely graded literary landscape. Iain Sharp was a librarian, a poet, a researcher, a wit, a humourist, a good fellow well met, and a scourge of the pretentious. He belongs to no literary school, clique, or revolutionary movement. His poems, like his sadly absent person, are kind, cruel, humorous, sad, wicked, clever, and above all, memorable. He is missed—his self-parody, his wit, his fundamental decency, and razor-sharp put-downs of the foolish and self-advertising (myself included). But his brilliantly subversive poem on the literary obsession with selfhood, ‘The Iain Sharp Poem’, will remain forever as a reproach to a tired history of lazy poetic selfhood. The Iain Sharp Poem Iain Sharp is a fat parcel of mixed groceries tied with a clumsy knot. Iain Sharp is a black kite adrift on changeable winds. Iain Sharp is a pile of scoria tricking softly to the sea. Whenever I peep in mirrors Iain Sharp frowns back at me. It’s terrifying. Iain Sharp is a runaway tramcar. Iain Sharp is a chunk of moonrock. Iain Sharp is nine letters wrenched from the Roman Alphabet. Look there and there! Bits of bright confetti blow from chapel to chapel. I chase them with outstretched hands. They might be Iain Sharp