NZ literature loses poet who spoke for a nation

By BERNARD ORSMAN

Poet Allen Curnow, who played a seminal role in defining the New Zealand psyche, has died in Auckland. He was aged 90.

Dr Curnow, a member of the exclusive Order of New Zealand and the only local poet with a substantial international reputation, died suddenly of a heart attack on Sunday.

The most recent of his 20 volumes of verse, The Bells of St Babel's, won the poetry section at this year's Montana Book Awards and a documentary on him, Early Days Yet, has just screened at film festivals.

Prime Minister and Minister for the Arts Helen Clark called Dr Curnow the elder statesman of New Zealand poetry whose work "helped forge a distinctive New Zealand voice and identity".

Herald columnist Gordon McLauchlan said Dr Curnow had been for a long time New Zealand's greatest living poet.

In 1997, McLauchlan wrote that anyone old enough and steeped enough in language and culture would remember the chord he struck in the national psyche with Landfall in Unknown Seas, on the 300th anniversary of the discovery of New Zealand by Abel Tasman. The poem was set to music by Douglas Lilburn.

Born in Timaru, the son of an Anglican vicar, he joined the Christchurch Press as a reporter. Terrified by the job, he turned to the Anglican Church but after three years went back to the Press as a subeditor from 1935 to 1948.

Later he taught English at Auckland University, became a doctor of literature in 1966, and received an honorary literature doctorate from Canterbury University in 1975.

For 40 years from the late 1930s, he wrote light satirical verse under the pseudonym of Whim-Wham for the Herald and Press.

He is survived by his wife, Jeny, and two sons and a daughter from an earlier marriage.

The Skeleton of the Great Moa in the Canterbury Museum

The skeleton of the moa on iron crutches

Broods over no great waste; a private swamp

Was where this tree grew feathers once, that hatches

Its dusty clutch, and guards them from the damp.

Interesting failure to adapt on islands,

Taller but not more fallen than I, who come

Bone to his bone, peculiarly New Zealand's.

The eyes of children flicker round this tomb.


Under the skylights, wonder at the huge egg

Found in a thousand pieces, pieced together

But with less patience than the bones that dug

In Time deep shelter against ocean weather.


Not I, some child, born in a marvellous year,

Will learn the trick of standing upright here.