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“... A Pantoum if th’assassination could trammel up the consequence, and catch, with his surcease, success; that but this blow might be the be-all and the end-all ... here, but here, upon this bank and shoal of time we’ld jump the life to come Macbeth Quantifiable griefs. The daily kill. One bullet, with his name on, his surcease. ‘The casualties were few, the damage nil’ – The scale was blown up, early in the piece ...”

“... The last act is bloody, however fine the rest of the play. They throw earth over your head and it is finished for ever. Pascal, Pensées 1 Refuge in San Remo won’t work out. Local health officialdom rules La signora è malata. Not welcome this side of the frontier. France is not far: why don’t I try cousin Connie Beauchamp? Nice place they say they’ve got in Menton ...”

“... of the best poetry in English at least since the Romantics, is, in a controversial phrase used by Allen Curnow in the introduction to one of his two anthologies of New Zealand poetry, ‘local and special at the point where we pick up the traces’. The phrase typically says what Curnow wants it to say – that the ...”

“... what I think V.S. Naipaul has called the client cultures. In my last year at school I discovered Allen Curnow’s poetry and his 1945 anthology, A Book of New Zealand Verse, which historians often use as a marker in the establishment of a distinct and self-reliant New Zealand literature. In 1951, the year Curnow, then ...”

“... collective enjoyment. The rarity is to find something not like a ‘poem’, more like a person. Allen Curnow, like the later Auden, has the gift of making a contraption with a guy inside it, someone whose interest is not that of being a poet. Nor of coming from New Zealand. He has his own country, caught in a transparent gleam by such poems as ‘A ...”

“... Cretaceous coprolite in the Natural History Museum. Wild country was all mapped long ago. Once, as Allen Curnow has it, ‘simply by sailing in a new direction/We could enlarge the world.’ Now neither art nor the planet offers much virgin territory. Nauman’s excursion does not take us places we have never been before. We may admire the way he finds ...”

“... When Les Murray writes, ‘the white-faced heron hides in the drain with her spear,’ or when Allen Curnow writes, ‘the small wind instruments in the herons’ throats / play an incorrigible music,’ there is in each case the shock of something quite particular, and of language forced to find a way of matching it. Someone is forgetting himself and ...”

“... by fine shades and subtleties. Pondering on what it is that makes the difference between him and Allen Curnow, two poets remarkable for the multiple pressures they impose on the language of their poems, it occurred to me that Murray’s skill is that of a natural linguist: Curnow’s is that of a genuinegly ...”