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.

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...

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 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 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....

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,...

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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