Selected Poems, Allen Curnow, Penguin Group New Zealand, Limited, 1982, 0140422994, 9780140422993, . .

Anti gravity , Cilla McQueen, 1984, Poetry, 48 pages. .

Dream and disillusion a search for Australian cultural identity, David Walker, 1976, , 279 pages. .

Look back harder critical writings 1935-1984, Allen Curnow, 1987, Literary Criticism, 337 pages. .

Four plays , Allen Curnow, 1972, , 245 pages. .

The Penguin book of New Zealand verse , , Margaret Rose Orbell, 1985, Poetry, 575 pages. .

Benzina , Cilla McQueen, 1988, Poetry, 48 pages. .

An anthology of New Zealand verse , Robert McDonald Chapman, Jonathan Francis Bennett, 1956, , 341 pages. .

Allen Curnow , Alan Roddick, 1980, Literary Criticism, 64 pages. .

An anthology of New Zealand poetry in English , , Gregory O'Brien, Mark Williams, 1997, Poetry, 547 pages. .

Landfall, Volume 17 , , 1968, Literary Criticism, . .

A Small Room with Large Windows Selected Poems, Allen Curnow, 1962, Poetry, Modern, 84 pages. .

Selected poems 1940-1989 , Allen Curnow, Jul 3, 1990, Poetry, 209 pages. .

Selected Poems , C. Day Lewis, Jul 20, 2008, Poetry, 80 pages. Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works ....

Bright Star Selected Poems, John Keats, Miriam Chalk, Jul 30, 2008, , 90 pages. JOHN KEATS edited with an introduction by Miriam Chalk This book gathers the most potent passages from Keats together, including the famous 'Odes', the sonnets, the luxuriously ....

Thomas Allen Munro Curnow ONZ CBE (17 June 1911 – 23 September 2001) was a New Zealand poet and journalist. Curnow was born in , New Zealand and educated at Christchurch Boys' High School, Canterbury University, and Auckland University. He then taught English at Auckland University from 1950 to 1976.

Curnow was the son of a fourth generation New Zealander, an Anglican clergyman, and he grew up in a religious family. The family was of Cornish origin.[1] During his early childhood they often moved, living in Canterbury, Belfast, Malvern, Lyttelton and New Brighton. He was later educated at Christchurch BHS as well as at the universities of Canterbury and Auckland. After completing his education he worked from 1929 to 1930 at the Christchurch Sun, before moving once again to Auckland to prepare for the Anglican ministry at St John's Theological College (1931–1933). In this period Curnow also published his first poems in University periodicals, such as Kiwi and Phoenix.

From 1934 he returned to the South Island, where he started a correspondence with Iris Wilkinson and Alan Mulgan, as well as finding a job at The Press the Christchurch morning daily newspaper, having decided against a career in the Anglican ministry. At the same time, he also started a lifelong friendship with and contributed to the Caxton Press, submitting some of his poems.

Curnow wrote a long-running weekly satirical poetry column under the pen-name of Whim Wham for The Press from 1937, and then the New Zealand Herald from 1951, finishing in 1988 - a far-reaching period in which he turned his keen wit to many world issues.[2] From Franco, Hitler, Vietnam, Apartheid, and the White Australia policy, to the internal politics of and the eras of and , all interspersed with humorous commentary on New Zealand's obsession with rugby and other light-hearted subjects.

He is however, more celebrated as poet than as a satirist. His poetic works are heavily influenced by his training for the Anglican ministry, and subsequent rejection of that calling, with Christian imagery, myth and symbolism being included frequently, particularly in his early works (such as 'Valley of Decision'). He draws consistently on his experiences in childhood to shape a number of his poems, reflecting perhaps a childlike engagement with the environment in which he grew up, these poems bringing the hopeful, curious, questioning voice that a childlike view entails. Curnow's work of course is not all so innocently reflective. The satirist in Curnow is certainly not pushed aside in his poetic works, but is explored instead with a greater degree of emotional connectivity and self-reflection. His works concerning the New Zealand Landscape and the sense of isolation experienced by one who lives in an island colony are perhaps his most moving and most deeply pertinent works regarding the New Zealand condition. His landscape/isolation centered poetry reflects varying degrees of engaged fear, guilt, accusation, rage and possessiveness, creating an important but, both previously and still, much neglected dialog with the New Zealand landscape. He positions himself as an outside critic (he was far less religiously and politically involved than contemporaries like James K. Baxter, and far more conventional in his lifestyle also) and though perhaps less impassioned in his writing than his contemporaries, his poetic works are both prophetic and intelligent.

Circa 1957 (year uncertain): The Hucksters and the University : or, Out of Site, Out of Mind; or Up Queen Street Without a Paddle. A happy little poem for all the family ... read by the author at a public poetry reading in the Auckland City Art Gallery on 24 May 1957, Auckland: Pilgrim Press (broadsheet)[5]

Allen Curnow (1911-2001) is a central figure in the emergence of an authentic . A clue to this pivotal role can perhaps be traced in the fruitful duality of his parentage: born in Timaru he was the son of a clergyman and fourth generation New Zealander, and of an English mother who never felt entirely at home in her adopted country. Originally destined for the church, Curnow converted to doubt and instead pursued a career in journalism. Following a post-war trip to England he joined the English Department at Auckland University where he taught from the 1950s to 1976. His first collection appeared in 1933 but it was his editorship of two landmark anthologies that sealed his reputation: A Book of New Zealand Verse, and The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse. These proved equally influential and controversial in their assertion of "some common problem of the imagination" particular to the New Zealander's situation. Curnow's importance was recognised by numerous awards including the New Zealand Book Award which he won six times, the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, Cholmondeley Award and the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. He was given a CBE in 1986 and received the in 1990.

C K Stead has written, "It was as if no one had quite seen New Zealand in the English language until Curnow saw it." This sense of discovery is re-enacted in a late poem about childhood memory, 'A Sight for Sore Eyes'. Here the freshness of the boy's response to the landscape is contrasted with his mother's insistence on trying to grow English flowers in unsuitable soil. Throughout his career, Curnow maintained this independent vision, an irreverence for "old-masterly/murk" ('Blind Man's Holiday'). His scepticism may have led him to reject religious doctrine, but he continued his philosophical investigations, in particular into the way the human mind creates its own reality. This concern and his characteristic tone, at once both "skittish and profound" (Peter Porter) is present in 'Continuum' which combines abstract musings on the nature of thought with a wry, colloquial language.

Agathis australis Anawhata Auckland BANG beach bird blind blood blue bone burning Charles Brasch cloud cold colours count crack crying dark dead death door dream drowning dust DYLAN THOMAS earth Enola Gay Erewhon eyes face father feet fingers fire fish fuck Gordon Brown green guns hand hang harbour Hokianga islands J.C. Beaglehole Karekare knew land leaf lifted light Lone Kauri Road look mangroves Maori memory miles mind mirror moon morning mother mountains never Ngapuhi night ocean past poem rhubarb rhubarb rock round sailed sand scarlet SCRAP-BOOK seaward ship silence smell SNCF soul South Island stone Tane Tane mahuta there's thing thought tide Torlesse Range trees turn underfoot walk wall warm wave weather what's wind window word write yellow Zealand

No New Zealand poet so consistently defied expectations as Allen Curnow. Over his long and deeply influential career, Curnow traversed a huge terrain of poetic voices and concerns, and won many awards and other forms of recognition. He was made a CBE in 1986 and received the Order of New Zealand in 1990, and was awarded the A.W. Reed Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2000 Montana New Zealand Book Awards. In his Collected Poems 1933–73, Curnow wrote: ‘I had to get past the severities, not to say rigidities, of our New Zealand anti-myth: away from questions which present themselves as public and answerable, towards the questions which are always private and unanswerable.’ A critic and anthologiser of New Zealand poetry, Curnow’s observations throughout his lifetime shaped the direction and debates — often controversial — about poetry in this country.

During and after the war Curnow’s own poetry gradually became less preoccupied with issues of history and national identity and moved towards more personal and universal themes (for example, ‘At Dead Low Water’, 1945). As he wrote in the Author’s Note to Collected Poems 1933–73 (1974): ‘I had to get past the severities, not to say rigidities, of our New Zealand anti-myth: away from questions which present themselves as public and answerable, towards the questions which are always private and unanswerable. The geographical anxieties didn’t disappear; but I began to find a personal and poetic use for them, rather than let them use me up’ (p. xiii). Reflective of this tendency were the collections Jack Without Magic (Caxton, 1946) and At Dead Low Water and Sonnets (Caxton, 1949).

In the 1950s and 1960s Curnow got caught up in intergenerational and interregional conflicts with the younger Wellington-based writers and Baxter, especially in connection with his reviews in Here Now of the early issues of Johnson’s New Zealand Poetry Yearbook (1951–52) and then the contents of his own second anthology, The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse (1960), the publication of which was delayed by disputes about his selections and introduction.

Curnow has written about this episode: ‘My critical positions, as understood from my reviews and anthologies, inevitably came under some fire: whether from an older generation who thought me unjust to respected poets of their time, or from writers younger than myself who believed themselves underrated, and who interpreted any emphasis on a New Zealand particularity or "common problem" as a restrictive desideratum—so to speak, a charge for admission to my anthologies which they were not prepared to pay. Such challenges came to a head in 1957–58, when a second anthology The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse (1960) was on the point of publication in the United Kingdom. A set of galley-proofs fell into the hands of young Wellington poets employed in the School Publications Branch of the Education Department. Letters were rushed off to England threatening a concerted withdrawal by several poets the threatened walk-out didn’t eventuate. But publication was delayed two years. Invited to undertake a sequel to the 1960 Penguin, I refused.’

After A Small Room with Large Windows (Oxford University Press, 1962)—a selected poems published in the UK which contained only two previously uncollected poems—Curnow published no further verse collection until Trees, Effigies, Moving Objects appeared in 1972. From the perspective of the end of the 1990s it is apparent that this brilliant sequence of eighteen poems initiated a new phase of his poetic career. The increasingly elaborate and highly wrought texture of poems of the 1950s, such as ‘Spectacular Blossom’ and ‘A Small Room with Large Windows’, gave way to a more openly textured verse, often vividly colloquial, imagistic, and idiomatic in expression while still precisely calculated in its effects. Also with this book a new landscape made a forceful entry into the poetry—that of the bush-clad hills and wild beaches of Auckland’s west coast, in particular Lone Kauri Road and Karekare Beach; as Curnow explained in a note in Selected Poems 1940–1989 (1990): ‘I have spent most of my summers and weekends there since 1961.’

In Selected Poems 1940–1989 Curnow replaced the chronological arrangement of earlier collections with a broadly thematic sequence, so as to make a single poem, as it were, out of the poems of a lifetime, as if in demonstration of the statement in the Author’s Note to Collected Poems 1933–1973 (1974): ‘the poetry is all one book’. Early Days Yet also eschews conventional practice by organising the poems in reverse chronological sequence (also adopted in Continuum), an arrangement in part explained by the volume’s epigraph from Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (a fertile source text for Curnow), which begins: ‘The Erewhonians say that we are drawn through life backwards; or again that we go onwards into the future as into a dark corridor.’ No poet has so consistently defied expectations as to what his future will reveal as Allen Curnow; but as his career has unfolded it has revealed a logic as inevitable as it has been unpredictable. His most recent poem at the time of writing is ‘Ten Steps to the Sea’ (London Review of Books, 1 Jan. 1998).

Curnow’s long and distinguished career has been marked by many awards and other forms of recognition. He received the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry on six occasions, the Commonwealth Poetry Prize in 1988, a Cholmondley Award in 1992, and in 1989 was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry.

Any discussion about the development of New Zealand literature over the last century would have to include some reference to the poet and critic, Allen Curnow. From his 1933 volume, Valley of Decision to his latest collection Early Days Yet, published in September 1997, Curnow’s poetic career stretches over six decades, allowing him to not only observe but also to be directly involved in the formation of a uniquely New Zealand style.

Allen Curnow once said that "the important thing in assessing the merit of a poem is time."1 Although many of his poems have stood the "tests of time" and can still be seen as some of New Zealand's best known work, Curnow's earliest poems seem to have retreated into the literary background. "The Unhistoric Story" and "House and Land" may appear in almost every New Zealand poetry anthology but what of the poems that came before?

Allen Curnow began publishing poems in various journals and periodicals in the mid-1930s. Amongst these publications was the Christchurch periodical Tomorrow which has been said to have helped launch the careers of a number of New Zealand's major writers from Curnow's generation including Glover, Fairburn and indeed Curnow himself. Between 1934 and 1938, Curnow published 14 poems in Tomorrow under his own name and 23 under the pseudonym "Julian" as well as a few prose items including letters, short stories and a review of Fairburn's Dominion.2 From these, only 9 poems, or partial sequences, have been subsequently published in Curnow's volumes from the 1930s and in his 1973 Collected Poems, while none at all are included in his Selected Poems from 1982 or his recently published Early Days Yet.3.

Furthermore, most of the poems which have "survived" Curnow's selection process have been revised, with changes to the text body as well as form. Many, which originally appeared as independent poems became part of sequences in subsequent publications. Indeed five out of the nine surviving poems or partial sequences from Tomorrow have been added together the make the 1939 sequence "Not in Narrow Seas". Two of the other poems were published in Enemies in 1937 while the remainder made up two thirds of the 1935 publication Three Poems. Even more changes were made when the poems were published again in the 1973 Collected Poems, despite Curnow's claim that he had "altered almost nothing in "Not in Narrow Seas."4 In this paper I shall examine the surviving poems from Curnow's Tomorrow years and consider how they have been changed. I shall also offer some suggestions as to why the revisions have been made and what this shows about Curnow as a poet.

The first Tomorrow poems to be re-published by Curnow were "Restraint" and "Aspect of Monism", both of which were originally published in 1935 under the pseudonym "Julian," and later appeared unchanged in Curnow's Three Poems in that same year. The relative speed of re-publication may account for the lack of textual changes in this second edition, but only very minor alterations are made even in the 1973 Collected Poems. For example, in "Restraint" the word "and" is omitted in line seven and in "Aspect of Monism" the title is pluralised, and the word "the " is replaced with "an" in the fourth line of part two. What is interesting about these poems is not how they have been revised independently, but rather why Curnow brought the two poems, and another called "The Wilderness," together in one volume.

Connections between the poems can be seen in terms of theme and imagery. In "Restraint," Curnow warns us not waste time searching for exotic places and exciting events when the true beauty of life can be found much closer to home. He suggests that we should appreciate the beauty we have around us because we might miss out altogether if we look too hard elsewhere. In the fifth stanza, Curnow stresses the "oneness" or unity of the world, and says that wherever we go can light the world for you. This feeling of oneness is echoed in "Aspects of Monism." In part ii, Curnow asserts that "Nothing passes, all is one moment / possessing richly world's breadth." Both poems use similar imagery of continuity or seamlessness in terms of time and space. Likewise in part iii, the image of sunrise that we saw in "Restraint" stanza five is adopted and developed, capturing the "bodiless unity" of the world at dawn. In part iv Curnow sums up with the idea that "earth, love, death, [are] lost in a single span" of time. These poems all claim that everything is interlinked and part of one unified experience. There is a pattern in everything including the world in which we live. http://edufb.net/3239.pdf http://edufb.net/4107.pdf http://edufb.net/3067.pdf http://edufb.net/3934.pdf http://edufb.net/625.pdf http://edufb.net/2997.pdf http://edufb.net/620.pdf http://edufb.net/3142.pdf http://edufb.net/3268.pdf http://edufb.net/1145.pdf http://edufb.net/970.pdf http://edufb.net/3411.pdf http://edufb.net/2446.pdf http://edufb.net/957.pdf http://edufb.net/581.pdf http://edufb.net/1942.pdf http://edufb.net/2696.pdf