SOURCE: Robinson, Peter. “Allen Curnow Travels.” English: The Journal of the English Association 49 (spring 2000): 39-63.

In the following essay, Robinson draws mostly on poems from Curnow's Trees, Effigies, Moving Objects, examining the specificity of place and moment in Curnow's poetry.

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‘I'm a stranger here myself’ expresses a solidarity between people from somewhere else who meet on the grounds of a similarity in different foreignnesses. Allen Curnow likes the phrase, employing a variation in ‘Friendship Heights’ from 1972, ‘I am absently walking in another summer / a stranger here myself’ (156),¹ and he teases out further senses by halving it over a line break ten years later for ‘Impromptu in a Low Key’: ‘I'm a stranger / here myself’ (89). The phrase echoes beyond the situation of the overseas traveller to hint that Curnow from about 1973, a little like W. B. Yeats some fifty years before, had found himself detached from his personal contributions...