Verse-making and man
Even in death, Allen Curnow remains New Zealand’s foremost poet. His six-decade career included more than 30 collections of verse, numerous plays, edited volumes, popular satirical poems (penned under the pseudonym Whim Wham), a Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry and umpteen literary awards. Poems such as Landfall in Unknown Seas stand as symbols of New Zealand’s distinctive cultural and literary identity.
By weight and dimension alone, Allen Curnow: Collected Poems and Allen Curnow: Simply by Sailing in a New Direction — a Biography surely suggest something of these achievements and the legacy left by their subject. Fortunately, the heaviness of the product is more than matched by the weightiness of the content, making both books welcome additions to New Zealand poetry past and present.
Of course, there have been other books assembling Curnow’s poetic oeuvre. Collected Poems 1933 — 1973, Allen Curnow: Selected Poems (1982), Selected Poems 1940 — 1989 and
Early Day Yet: New and Collected Poems 1941 — 1997 to name a few. However, ensuring its point of distinction, this latest Collected Poems
is the first to gather works from across the entire span of Curnow’s life. If it’s not a complete collection (in that it doesn’t hold every poem Curnow ever wrote), it comes as close as possible to doing so.
Thoroughness can be seen in highlights among its congregation, such as the early, formal Valley of Decision and The Spirit Shall Return and Curnow’s first nods towards freer forms, New Zealand City and A Woman in Mind. There are the playful (Impromptu in a Low Key, The Game of Tag among them) and the indispensable such as The Weather in Tohunga Crescent and the epic
Early Days Yet.
In short, this is a book which, in its array of poems well-loved and forgotten, offers familiarity and surprise.
Of the two books, the biography, Simply by Sailing in a New Direction is the most authoritative and fresh, if only because it offers what has never been — a credible examination of Curnow — and does so with rigour and vigour.
At 600 pages, author Terry Sturm and editor Linda Cassells are to be commended for their thoroughness, insight and refreshing depiction of their subject as brilliant and blemished. The early, sometimes unsettled years, adolescence in Lyttelton and formative Auckland student days; comprehensive discussions about developments of his collections and plays; friendships with Rita Angus, Denis Glover, Dylan Thomas and the like; even the ancestry, it’s all here, enabling one to close the book understanding how Curnow the icon was anchored in Curnow the man.
Allen Curnow: Collected Poems and Allen Curnow: Simply by Sailing in a New Direction — a Biography are amazing works. The aesthetic production, heft, and substantial content make them sumptuous products to own.
Both books [are] welcome additions to New Zealand poetry past and present.