A concise Curnow

Press, 9 July 1983, Page 18

A concise Curnow

Selected Poems. By Allen Curnow. Penguin, 1983. 246 pp. $10.95. (Reviewed by John Newton) Despite the richness and variety of this country’s poetry, two figures remain incontestably dominant. This Curnow volume, then, is welcome and timely; following the recent appearance of Baxter’s “Selected Poems,” it means that our two major poets are both available in concise and readily affordable form. The selection, made by Curnow himself, is hard to fault. He has included nothing from his first three volumes, beginning instead with the 1939 sequence “Not in Narrow Seas.” This severe treatment of his earliest work not only gives the volume a powerful and apposite take-off point, but also makes room for the inclusion of all his published poetry from 1949 to 1979. The four volumes of the forties,

also, are generously represented. The scope of this selection, then, is not very different from that of the 1974 “Collected Poems,” and readers who own that volume will probably not need this one as well; on the other hand, the inclusion of the highly acclaimed “An Incorrigible Music” (1979) may well be enough to justify the additional outlay. Curnow will always remain best known for those early poems exploring our national identity. They are his most important poems, not because they are his most accomplished or sophisticated, or even his most exciting, but simply because of their pivotal location in that period where our literature first becomes aware of itself. They are the product of a perfect marriage between a talent and a phase of cultural history. No poetry, and probably no writing of any kind, has done more to shape the way we think about our past and about our place in the world.

Reading these poems from this selection’s first decade is rather like reading Shakespeare’s sonnets — in that you keep stumbling over phrases which have become part of the language, and which you fall back on, barely considering their origin: “men of strength /Proved at football and in wars not their own” “a land of settlers with never a soul at home;” “Not I, some child, born in a marvellous year, / Will learn the trick of standing upright here;” and the list goes on. They are poems which have worn well and offer a wide range of pleasures, from “Not in Narrow Seas” and its steely debunking of historical myth, to that elegant and moving pair of sonnets collectively titled “Tomb of an Ancestor.” The latter marks the end of Curnow’s first major phase, and the end of his association with the Canterbury landscape.

This phase occupies the first hundred pages. The middle of the book is taken up with “Poems 1949-57” and “A Small Room with Large Windows,” the difficult, transitional work that leads finally — after a 15-year silence, during which Curnow published only one poem — to this last decade, and a remarkable burst of activity. Since 1972 he has published four strong volumes, the first three of which fill the last hundred pages. Curnow, such a towering figure in the forties, has been as innovative, and almost as dominant, in the seventies; only lan Wedde has been able to rival his dynamism. “I hope I have not finished yet,” wrote Curnow, in 1974. Indeed he was far from finished then, and let us hope the same is still true. As this “Selected Poems” reminds us, it is impossible to imagine how we would have been without him, or to believe that we could ever produce a more crucial poet.