Editorial: A poetic legacy that will last

When great poets die, the words stop. And, paradoxically, the outpouring of words about their greatness begins. That outpouring has begun for the man long regarded as New Zealand's foremost poet, Allen Curnow, who died on Sunday aged 90.

It is one of those quirks of death that would no doubt appeal to the poet.

We look, after all, to our poets to ask questions about ourselves: Who are we? What is our place in the world? What is it that makes us, in this case, New Zealanders? Now the question is: What did Allen Curnow mean to us?

Curnow was our poet, for almost 70 years. He helped define a country by enlarging its boundaries, while acknowledging the insecurities, the isolation we felt at living down here, at the end of the world: " ... a land of settlers, With never a soul at home."

Curnow hated the word nationalist, that "vile word". He preferred to say his work dealt with "being a nation, with the questions of where we are, and what we are".

His gift, a critic once offered of the poet who was a respected critic himself, "was his ability to write resounding, comprehensible lines the common reader could easily identify with".

As the "banjo-bard" of the weekly Whim Wham column, which he wrote for this paper from 1951 until 1988, he lampooned life in New Zealand in a long-lasting series of rhymed ballads, or in stanzas which gently poked the borax while imitating classical poetic forms.

He was appointed CBE in 1986 in recognition of a literary career which had already spanned 50 years, and was made a member of the Order of New Zealand in 1990. He collected awards the way other poets collect rejection slips.

"In the world of poetry I'm still running with the fast pack," he said in a 1980s interview. He ran with the fast pack from the 1930s and into a new millennium (he won the poetry section of this year's Montana Book Awards). He not only outlived his peers, he outwrote them. Of his work, he said, "I've been trying to write things that might last." He succeeded.