Allen Curnow, a poet often published and much admired by the LRB, died in September 2001. Early Days Yet: New and Collected Poems, 1941-97 is available from Carcanet. The Bells of Saint Babel’s has just been published in paperback.
Turn left at the sign. Lone Kauri Road winds down to the coast. That’s a drop of about five hundred feet. Look out for the waterfall, the wooden bridge, the mown grass, the pohutukawa glade.
The western horizon will have slid behind the mask of an eye-levelled next eyeballing wave. Park here. Proceed on foot. The spot has barbecues with MALE and FEMALE dunnies in a figtree
thicket,...
The typical tidal range, or difference in sea level between high and low tides, in the open ocean is about 2 ft(0.6m), but it is much greater near the coasts.
Desk encyclopedia
Our beach was never so bare. Freak tide, system fault, inhuman error, will it
never stop falling? After dark, said the tables of high water and sunset
pasted on the wall, which don’t deceive. Come on down...
Somebody mistook the day, or how
will we have found ourselves denied
entry, by chained gate, padlocked
bolted door of an empty dark shed
of a hall, miles from the next town-
ship, as many from the last lit lamp?
The night itself unpunctuated,
no Southern Cross, no Pointers, no
cartwheeling, hand- standing giant
Orion, aka Urine (born cauled
in a sacrificial Boeotian cow’s
pelt, pissed...
Good writing, in prose or verse, can seem a sort of visible distillation, brandy-like, of the anima vagula blandula, the tenuous and transparent daily self that produced it. Another kind of good...
Much of the best poetry in English at least since the Romantics, is, in a controversial phrase used by Allen Curnow in the introduction to one of his two anthologies of New Zealand poetry,...
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