By PETER SIMPSON
Poet. Died aged 90.
The death of Allen Curnow this week ended one of the most remarkable careers in modern literature.
Curnow's first poems were published in 1931 when he was 20; his last were published this year in the Montana Award-winning The Bells of St Babels (Auckland University Press). An active poetic career of 70 years is almost unprecedented, especially considering the exacting standards Curnow maintained from beginning to end.
Thomas Allen Monro Curnow was born in Timaru on June 17, 1911. His father, a fourth-generation New Zealander, was an Anglican minister and Curnow spent his early years in a succession of Canterbury vicarages. Sharply detailed memories of his boyhood figured prominently in Curnow's late poems, such as A Busy Port and Early Days Yet.
After attending Christchurch Boys High School, Curnow worked briefly in journalism before moving to Auckland in 1931 to train for the ministry at St John's Theological College.
During his student years in Auckland, his literary career got under way. He was one of the group which produced the legendary magazine Phoenix (1932-33). Bob Lowry, Phoenix's printer, also printed Curnow's first book, Valley of Decision (1933). The title alluded to his decision not to be ordained. He returned to the South Island and took up journalism again, working for the Press for 14 years, mostly as a subeditor. He married Betty LeCren in 1936; they had three children.
In Christchurch, Curnow became firm friends with the poet and printer Denis Glover, who had founded the Caxton Press.
Eight titles by Curnow were published by Caxton between 1935 and 1949, including Island & Time, The Axe (a verse play), and A Book of New Zealand Verse, 1923-45.
These books established him as the leading poet, anthologist and critic of his generation. His poems subtly interrogated New Zealand's history and landscape in a new accent.
They were national in focus, but not in any flag-waving sense; their voice was sceptical and ironic, encapsulating the condition of being a New Zealander in sardonic, often memorably aphoristic phrases, as in the famous final couplet of The Skeleton of the Great Moa: "Not I, some child, born in a marvellous year / Will learn the trick of standing upright here."
Chief among these poems was Landfall in Unknown Seas, commissioned to mark Abel Tasman's tercentenary, and soon graced with music by the late Douglas Lilburn, who became a close friend and collaborator. Lilburn's music was played as Curnow's coffin was carried from St Mary's, Parnell, at his funeral on Thursday.
In his Caxton anthology, Curnow set the agenda for much subsequent discussion of New Zealand culture. He argued that common elements in the poems he had collected by Baxter, Bethell, Brasch, Fairburn, Glover, Hyde, Mason and himself signalled the emergence of a unique New Zealand identity.
Meanwhile, his own poetry moved towards more personal and philosophical concerns, a tendency which continued after a year abroad in 1949 with his return to Auckland in 1951 to teach in the English department of the University of Auckland, a job he retained until his retirement, in 1976.
He married Jenifer Tole in 1965.
During the 1950s and 1960s, Curnow became involved in lively controversies provoked by his criticism and anthologising.
His Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse (1960) was delayed by the interventions of disaffected younger poets (including James K. Baxter and Louis Johnson) who disputed his representation of their work and the prescriptive nationalism (as they saw it) of his criticism.
Meanwhile, he temporarily ceased publishing new poems, though he continued to write radio plays and his popular weekly satirical poems for the Press and the New Zealand Herald, published under the pseudonym Whim-Wham. Eventually, the poetic sequence Trees, Effigies, Moving Objects appeared in 1972, instigating a vigorous second wind comprising eight new books that remained undiminished until his death.
These vivid poems brought a new landscape into Curnow's poetry: Karekare Beach and Lone Kauri Road in the Waitakere Ranges, the outward setting for much of his later verse.
Curnow's international reputation continued to grow, especially after his poems began regularly appearing in the London Review of Books.
He won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize (in addition to a swag of New Zealand Book Awards) and was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for poetry. He was made CBE in 1986 and became a member of the Order of New Zealand in 1990.
Early Days Yet, a fine film documentary about him directed by Shirley Horrocks, was released this year, and will be shown on TV One on Sunday, October 7.
To those who knew him Allen Curnow was a marvellous conversationalist and a man of great charm.
A superb reader of his own work, he gave his last performance at the Going West writers' festival days before his death. He is survived by his wife, Jeny, and his three children, Wystan, Belinda and Tim.
* Peter Simpson is an associate professor of English at the University of Auckland. He edited Allen Curnow's collected criticism, Look Back Harder: Critical Writings 1935-1984 (AUP, 1987).
<i>Obituary:</i> Allen Curnow
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