All the hallmarks of vintage Curnow

By GUY ALLAN*

It is hard not to read a new book of Allen Curnow's verse against all his others.

Born in 1911, he has lived a long life - "eight decades crowding me behind," as he puts it. The blurb reminds us that his first book was published in 1932. Even his celebrated comeback after a long silence was nearly 30 years ago.

So, if you go looking for Curnow hallmarks in The Bells of Saint Babel's, you will not be disappointed. Like taut openings that put you straight into the middle of many-sided things:

Rear-vision glass

knows what comes up

out of whatever

concealed exit

I've left behind

me.


Or lush sentences that wind an oblique way to their end:

One wild, white

arum leans landward a little, round

which in its pool, drip-fed off

a slimed rock-face, is arranged the sky

for inspection.


There are scholarly notes on subjects such as Pushkin's sources and the Pan myth and sometimes a stately, ruminative tone but this is not "academic" poetry.

Its subjects can be as gritty and discomforting as a boy whose tumour is left to kill him or a dog thrown off the back of a ute and strangled by the rope which held it.

The language slips without fuss into contemporary idiom (Thomas a Kempis' taking on an "imitation" of Christ is a "big ask") and the Pan myth is threaded through the story, both jocular and tender, of a failed relationship of his father's youth.

The fact that Curnow is continuing to write is a great privilege. An even bigger one is that his poetry remains as superb as it ever was.

Vincent O'Sullivan's last book, Seeing You Asked (1999), was a comeback of sorts, his first collection of new verse for 10 years. It was deservedly much praised.

While not as consistently interesting, Lucky Table has many of the same strengths. O'Sullivan has few peers when it comes to taking the breath away with daringly clever metaphors.

At a funeral, a fly on the coffin is "a distant figure on a skate rink." A few lines later, the wreath "big as a Clydesdale collar quivers / its delicate moist tendrils."

He is at his best when he narrows the focus, to a particular event, memory, place or person - seldom anything that looks on the surface to have grand significance. Reminiscences of school-teachers, for example.

Themes that are undoubtedly grand, such as death and desire, are there all right but they bubble away quietly rather than become the "point" of anything O'Sullivan has to say. With "I supposes" and "know what I means," he maintains the pretence of just telling you what is on his mind, in a manner that just happens to be witty and engaging.

* Guy Allan is an Auckland trade union official and freelance writer.

* Allen Curnow is a guest at the Auckland Writers' Festival this weekend.

The Bells of Saint Babels

By Allen Curnow

Auckland University Press $19.95


Lucky Table

By Vincent O'Sullivan

Victoria University Press $24.95