Allen Curnow

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.

At nine fifteen a.m. on the first day of his eighty- first year. Why don’t I

first-person myself? I was hoping nobody would ask me that question

yet. The strong smell of chlorine for one thing, one thing at a time, please.

For instance, there’s always this file of exercyclists riding the gallery

over the pool. Bums on saddles, pommelled crotches. The feet rotate, the

hands grip,...

Poem: ‘An Unclosed Door’

Allen Curnow, 27 June 1991

Freshened by any wind, sanitised with pine and cypress, the slaughterhouse

is cool as a church inside. High rafters too. A gallery. The hooks hang ready.

Nothing else intercepts the day’s late blaze across the Seven Sleepers’ chins

and Cooper’s Knobs, on this point between adjacent bays, only a blotched light

can get past, as the wind in the trees, fidgeting to the doorway....

Poem: ‘A Scrap-Book’

Allen Curnow, 7 December 1989

I

The light in the window blew out in a strong draught only to return wearing a black mask, behind William Woon’s chair, which he draws up close

to the desk. A roundhouse swing from the nor’east rocks the plank walls from blocks to purlins. He trims the Miller Vestal’s ragged flame, lays the scrap-

book open by the burning oil, finds a clean pen, writes Detained (flourishing...

Poem: ‘An Evening Light’

Allen Curnow, 4 August 1988

The sun on its way down torched the clouds and left them to burn themselves out on the ground:

the north-west wind and the sun both drop at once behind the mountains. The foreground fills

with a fallen light which lies about the true colours of absconded things, among

which I place this child whose tenth birthday happens to have been my father’s, that will be

a hundred years next...

Poem: ‘A Time of Day’

Allen Curnow, 7 January 1988

A small charge for admission. Believers only. Who present their tickets where a five- barred farm gate gapes on its chain

and will file on to the thinly grassed paddock. Out of afternoon pearl-dipped light the dung-green biplane descended

and will return later, and later, late as already it is. We are all born of cloud again, in a caul

of linen lashed to the air-frame of the age, smelling of...

Hugging the cats

John Bayley, 14 June 1990

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...

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Second Wind

C.K. Stead, 16 February 1989

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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