At 80 Curnow has produced a collection which is quintessentially his distinctive voice. So much is this so that as poems revisit locales and ideas, there are almost suggestions of Curnow mimicking Curnow with weak jokiness: “Foot of a cliff, arm of a stream” (Ten Steps to the Sea), relaxed lines sinking frankly to prose: “Here/ the annual New/ Zealanders sweats/ brief tenure out” (A nice place on the Riviera), the hackneyed image “in its pool ... is arranged the sky/ for inspection”. (Ten steps to the sea).

There is more than a suggestion in For Peter Porter at Seventy of a work dutifully produced to order, in this case for the international collection Paeans for Peter Porter. This is in the form of a pantoum in which the second line of each stanza becomes the first of the next, phrases and references are repeated throughout, and the final stanza consists of lines from previous stanzas. This one has, as do most pantoum, very little to say not so interestingly. There is to this reader a slightly similar hint in the Four Poems After Pushkin published first in After Puhskin: Versions of the poems written by contemporary poets. These are probably very good modern versions of the originals but as a consequence convey only too well the over-long, dramatising search for the striking verbal effect and the portentous symbol (like the poison tree) of the original Russian Romanticism.

Nonetheless this is a typically enjoyable and clever Curnow collection. Ten Steps to the Sea introduces many of the settings, themes and moods of the volume. Amid the details of a seaside and escape from flood, the image of the rising sun that blinds suddenly links to the pain of cancer and the reality numbing drugs used to control it. The next two poems seem to come from news reportage: The Kindest Thing is about the inhumane treatment of a dog, and The cake uncut has as subject matter the refusal of a religious family to let a child have treatment for cancer, and is a nicely judged, understated piece of satire. The Bells of Saint Babel’s returns to family history of those who arrived by sailing ship at Lyttleton:

After those months

At sea, we stank

Worse than the Ark.

Faeces of all

Species.”

A nice place on the Riviera is Curnow’s Menton memento. But it is also reminds how Curnow has consistently gone his own poetic way, drawing unexpected elements together, yet never emulating the electism-for-its-own-sake of much postmodernism. In the sections of this poem Mansfield, cousin Connie, Pascal, Thomas à Kempis and the Alpes Maritimes conjoin in layered meaning. The poem ends with “One/ more dull day scraped/ off a slaty sea”. Fantasia and fugue for Pan-pipe is another look at family history, leading by way of nineteenth century lyrics redolent with Romantic vocabulary to the god Pan, emblem of the imagination but also of the body and its desires as well as the dead Christ.

It’s perhaps worth noting that in most of the latter group the verse employs Curnow's couplet stanza form, the short lines allowing swift change of topic or reference and sudden ambiguities.

But for me The pocket compass shows Curnow at his succinct best. This sonnet’s tribute to G.E.T. brings together some of the central themes of Curnow's work: perception and its reworking in imagination - in this poem the compass rose - and the perpetual throb of loss and pain in the midst of the hectic detail of minute on minute living:

Pencil or pen can’t replicate

The rose in the mind’s eye, indelibly true

North by needle. I paint it over again

In sight of the sea with one more sun to drown.

Curnow provides ample notes on some poems for those who want them.
The pretentious quotes on the back cover of a sort which Auckland University Press is over-fond of: - “celebrating the sacred text that is the world” (Eggleton), “the text constantly aware of its own gestures” (Wallace-Crabbe) - add nothing to the reader’s appreciation of the poetry nor is likely to win new readership.

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A night of Commitment. Edward Gay. Four stories. Published by Exposed Publications, P. O. Box 32 285, Devonport, Auckland. Reviewed by Trevor Reeves. No Price Given.

This is a small collection of some 44 pages of four stories by Edward Gay. Gay is 21 years of age and this is his first publication. Completing his education at the Senior College of New Zealand he was, for a time, working as a chef. Now, he "lives of his savings." The shortest story, called "True Love" is but a page and a half long and has to do with young love and desire – delightfully put, understated to the degree that you quickly get the picture. I am one of those who largely goes along with the idea that most generation x writing is juvenilia of the worst order - judging from magazines I have seen, particularly those on line. However, this book is different. It is nice to see young fiction so alive and well! There is a sophistication of style in these pieces that would put many an older, more established writer, to shame. There is sympathy and humour for all the characters he describes. In "A Night of Commitment", the title story – deceptively simple looking but tellingly describing the woes and travails of young love, and no love at all! Maybe a bit of description of the looks of his characters might have been in order, but I didn't really miss that. You know the sort of thing, short hair, long hair, short, tall, fat, thin… These word "pictures" help in defining one's perceptions of the success of the plot. Victoria, desperately looking for commitment (marriage, house, babies etc) from a man, behaves in a way that gives quite a new definition to the word, "commitment"! "Victoria was so drunk that she couldn't have recognised a Rover from a Toyota". A short adventure in some bushes on Mount Victoria, Norm told Victoria, "I know this spot up Mount Victoria…." (groan, you might say), and a few wretched cliches later, the "act" is completed and Norm attempts to make his escape. True love, for Victoria, was never this hard! "in a matter of seconds, Norm had left Mount Victoria." "The Hostess", has a little more sophistication, although the theme is familiar – the youthful party where people get invited who shouldn't be and the culprit, Philip, leaves drunkenly for another party, driving his car… There is the inevitable funeral scene which is exquisitely put and with an ending that is on the one hand no surprise, but on the other hand, a bit of a jolt. The other story, "The Politician and the Vagrant" pretty well explains itself in the title and, of the four stories, is probably the best read. A bridge party, a dead cat, baby; a plot full of wilful improbabilities and with a nicely turned ending. Edward Gay is going to go a long way with his writing, in my opinion. I'll certainly be looking forward to seeing any new work by this writer.