Allen Curnow, one of New Zealand's great 20th-century writers and poets, died on September 23rd aged 90, in Auckland. While his country's poetry was dominated by the brilliant and spiritually brash James K. Baxter, Allen Curnow and C.K. Stead defined a main stream, open to European and American writing but deeply committed to the landscapes and cultures of their homeland.
A humane optimism marks even Allen Curnow's satires. He is angry less out of a sense that man is fallen than that he ought to have the strength and will to rise.
There is great particularity about his poems, and there are journalistic subjects - the kidnapping and murder of the Italian president Aldo Moro, and urgent news stories that emerge, from what is now history, with the freshness they had as morning headlines.
He recognised what language must do, and what it can do in verse. Against Baxter's Jacobean consonantal rhetoric, he achieved the lightness of song, even when the diction seems closest to speech.
Allen Curnow was born in Timaru, a fifth-generation New Zealander with poetry in his blood: on his mother's side, he could trace his ancestry to the Suffolk poet George Crabbe.
For a time, it seemed he would follow his father into the priesthood; educated at the universities of Canterbury and Auckland, he trained for the Anglican ministry from 1931-33, but became a journalist instead.
His writing, and a literary fund grant, took him to London, where, in 1949, he worked on the News Chronicle newspaper and broadcast occasionally for the BBC.
Returning home in 1951, he joined the staff of the English department at the University of Auckland.
He emerged into retirement a quarter of a century later as associate professor, with a career as a poet still ahead of him.
In the last seven decades, he published 20 volumes of poetry, his most recent being, The Bells Of St Babel's.
He was a dramatist, a defining critic, and an anthologist who did much to present New Zealand poetry to the anglophone world, especially with the Penguin Book Of New Zealand Verse (1960).
His first book of poems appeared when he was 22, and his first book of literary criticism when he was 24.
In 1939, he published a genuinely original collection, Not In Narrow Seas, which set out to add to "the anti-myth about New Zealand".
From such deliberate, even essayistic, intent and formal conventionality, his work moved far.
He excluded Not In Narrow Seas and his earlier poetry from his severely selective and celebrated Early Days Yet: New And Collected Poems 1941-1997 (1998).
Here, he gave retrospective coherence to his oeuvre, condensing it from 750 pages to 240. The unpruned body of work is unruly and uneven because his fascination with technique went hand in hand with his thematic development. As a result, he is the most various and available poet New Zealand has produced.
He never could quite settle into an orthodoxy of faith, faithlessness, prosody or form. There was always another, better method to move forward in language.
What marks most of the poems he stood by in Early Days Yet is celebration of the human and natural worlds.
The changes of tone can be sudden and effective; he is, by turns, funny, commonplace, scabrous, impassioned.
The late poems spend their time in retrospection, a return journey to the first years, not with nostalgia but with firm memory - places are, because they were.
Peter Porter described Allen Curnow as "this modern master". "He has been a major voice at every stage of his career," wrote C.K. Stead, "knowing what he is about, moving at his own pace, inventive, unpredictable, writing poetry which strikes me, as it has done serially over the years, as unsurpassed by the work of any other poet at present writing in English."
Allen Curnow was a member of the prestigious Order of New Zealand and an OBE.
He is survived by his wife, and two sons and a daughter from an earlier marriage.
Allen Curnow: born 1911; died, September 2001