SOURCE: Armstrong, Philip. “Dis/Coveries: Allen Curnow's Later Poetry.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 34, no. 1 (1999): 7-26.

In the following essay, Armstrong analyzes Continuum: New and Later Poems, 1972-1988, and considers how in Curnow's later poems, “the ordinary poses an extraordinary threat, the familiar returns in unfamiliar guise and the everyday turns into the last day.”

“Allen Curnow's Later Poems”—not his last. The incomplete comparative remains necessary, because Curnow himself remains very much with us: last year, 1998, he turned eighty-seven, and published several new poems.

No doubt the protracted shelf-life of the Curnow brand owes less to the poet's own longevity than to the exceptional durability of his poetic and, in particular, of his very substantial contribution to the project of a mid-century cultural nationalism that sought to define in no uncertain terms a canon for literature in New Zealand.¹ Curnow's two anthologies—A Book of New Zealand...