Anyone who studied poetry – or got drunk with anyone who did – will have heard someone have a crack at reciting the repeating bird call from Denis Glover’s iconic New Zealand poem The Magpies.

When Tom and Elizabeth took the farm / The bracken made their bed / and Quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle / The magpies said

Glover, who died in 1980, is perhaps our most celebrated poet, described by his biographer, Gordon Ogilvie, as one of the most “spirited, versatile and influential figures” in New Zealand literature.

He was a war hero too. He landed an infantry craft at Normandy on D-Day, earning the Distinguished Service Cross. He carried out four ‘suicide missions’ escorting the Arctic Convoys delivering their essential supplies to Russia, then an ally of the West in World War II against Hitler’s Nazis.

The Soviet Union awarded Glover the War Veteran’s medal for his service on the Russian convoys in 1975.

But the winds had changed by then and the Warsaw Pact countries of the Eastern bloc were in a nuclear stand off against the Nato countries of the democratic West.

Denis Glover and John Drew at Caxton Press in 1934 (photo by Jean Bertram) 

The Cold War had blown in and Glover was being watched. Not by the KGB but by New Zealand’s state intelligence agency, the SIS. They tracked his involvement with the peace movement, his meetings with Russians and studiously documented his prodigious drinking.

The story of the spy agency and the poet has been brought to light by his son Rupert Glover in an epilogue episode of the RNZ podcast series The Service, which tracks the role of the SIS in the Cold War.

Listen to the new episode of The Service: New Revelations