Eulogy delivered by Fiona Kidman at the funeral of Lauris Edmond, Wednesday 2nd February, 2000, Old St Pauls, Wellington.

"My beloved friend Lauris Edmond died last Friday on a beautiful sunny day at her home in Grass Street which she loved so much - planning dinner for her friend Lynne Dovey. She was, as her family says, in the fullness of her life. So we gather today to mourn her loss and to rejoice in her life.

Lauris has been one of New Zealand's finest poets, speaking always in a clear, melodious, often plangent voice that addressed directly matters of the heart: love, death, friendship, landscape, children and grandchildren, nothing trivial, although in the trivia of domestic life she often found some transforming redeeming value that turned it into powerful metaphor. In doing so, she touched thousands of New Zealand lives and created the sense that she belonged in some mysterious sense to them, to the people of New Zealand.

In part, that may be explained by the way people could identify with children through her poems, of being the parents of children, or their own sense of having been a child.

And, of course, none of this would have come about had it not been for Lauris's own large family of children, whom she loved with such a passionate and enduring ardour, and the way that her own life and work was reflected through being their mother. There is a famous poem of Lauris's called 'The Names' which was included in 50 Poems A Celebration, published to mark her 75th birthday last year: and this is how it begins:

Six o'clock, the morning still and the moon up, cool profile of the night: time small and flat as an envelope - see, you slip out easily: do I know you?

Your names still have the old power, they sing softly like voices across the water.

Virginia Frances Martin Rachel Stephanie Katherine.

Each of the names has its own resonance. And each one of you she loved, acknowledging and taking pride in your unique gifts and talents.

I called the names as she would call them. And more than that, I call the names of her grandchildren, as she did last year when we celebrated her birthday: Ruth, Jamil, Crispin, Camilla, Tess, Carlos, George, Grace, Louis, Patrick, Max, Austin, Jesse, Sylvia and Liamh. You all have your own special memories of what Lauris meant to you. I extend the sympathy of everyone here and all the people beyond who could not come, to you her children and grandchildren...also to her her brothers and sisters Clive and Dorothy and Lindsay and Denis and their families. There are messages coming in from all over the world, from England, Australia, Canada and South Africa.

I've had the privilege of sharing time with the family over the past five days. They have told me about the talent Lauris had for collecting special treasures with particular meaning for each grandchild, how chocolates surrounded each gift, all the delicacies and food treats, the carefully chosen postcards; she had an astonishing capacity for sending letters and the arrival of mail each day was a matter of vital importance.

She raised six children on the run, always running, running to the clothesline for instance so that the chores took the least possible time before she returned to her books, and study, which she first took extramurally as the children grew. The family remember the way she would look out the window on a clear day and say "we haven't done anything interesting lately, I think we should climb Mount Ruapehu today." And they would, even though it meant carrying the babies. She played the piano every evening, the children singing along until the inevitable "this is the way we brush our teeth, brush our teeth" all the way to the bathroom, with their Dad Trevor on the hunt for the stragglers.

This is the private face of a woman who became a very public figure, known for her 15 books of poetry, her famous autobiographical sequence, Hot October, Bonfires in the Rain, and The Quick World, and a great deal of other writing. She was awarded an OBE for services to literature, many prizes here and abroad, including the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, an honorary Doctorate of Literature from Massey University, the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship and last year the AW Reed Prize for Lifetime Achievement.

Throughout all her activities, she never abandoned her unique talent for cultivating friendship with a wide cross-section of people. My own friendship with Lauris spanned 28 years of intense regular conversation; we published our first books of poetry together in 1975.

Telephone conversations were one of her art forms and a way of keeping friendship alive; when she died she'd just finished a lively talk with Janet Wilson just back from a year in England. In the last page of her autobiography she recounts a dream of her own death in which she is dead but conscious, and urgently wants to get to the telephone, for there were people she must talk to before it was too late. It seems that she did make it after all.

To mention one or two friends is to leave out 10 or 20 or a hundred more; all the same, several of her friendships did reflect particular interests of hers. With Pat Hawthorne she shared her love of theatre and her interest in politics - she was a strong supporter of the Labour Party - with Colin James, the ballet. Roger Robinson, Vincent O'Sullivan and Dick Corballis helped her maintain her links with Victoria and Massey Universities. She had been a student and distinguished graduate of both universities and, later, at Victoria, Writers Fellow. She would teach for several years at Massey. Bill Oliver, Alistair and Meg Campbell were part of a regular lunchtime group, Marilyn Duckworth, and of course her sister Fleur Adcock, Rimeke Ensing, and Rachel McAlpine belonged to a period in the mid-1970s when women's voices had begun to be widely published. Bridget Williams was both publisher and close friend.

In the last years, there has been a very special group of friends, one that involved my interests as well, the Peppercorn Press group. Lauris, with Vincent, Pat, Shelagh Cox and John Thomson set up the review periodical New Zealand Books which is now entering its tenth year of publication. It started, basically, because Lauris thought there should be a review magazine of local books like the London and New York Times review periodicals.

Like Ruapehu, it was something to be done and she did it, she drove it. What's more, she never gave up. Colin and Lynne and her husband Ben Gray, and recently Jim Collinge, have been part of the group who have sustained her vision for the journal. Among her deep friendships of recent times have been those with the current editors Bill Sewell and Harry Ricketts with whom she credits a new phase of expansion and development for the journal.

What to say of Lauris? She had a powerful sense of social justice, she fought for the underdog; she had a cheerful disrespect for bureaucracy, and she was totally and fiercely independent, she was sometimes incorrigible. At the time of her death she had two new books ready for publication, one an Oxford anthology of New Zealand love poems which she had edited, and a subject she certainly understood.

I had a letter from Frances Cherry yesterday. She wrote of Lauris:

She was so in the world is all I can say. She shone, she was there to the full in every sense. Such a person, such a woman, who spoke for women so calmly in her poetry, who made it allowable for women to be true to themselves, to value all those things important to women: heart, soul, realness, family... free of games and pretentiousness, oh how could such a woman not be missed, not leave a huge hole in the world.

And from me, thank you my dear darling friend, for all you have meant to me."