SOURCE: Stead, C. K. “Allen Curnow's Poetry: Notes Towards a Criticism.” In Essays on New Zealand Literature, edited by Wystan Curnow, pp. 54-70. Auckland, New Zealand: Heinemann Educational Books, 1973.

In the following essay, first published as a review of Curnow's A Small Room with Large Windows in Landfill 65 (March 1963), the author suggests that Curnow's poems are preoccupied with the conflict between what he calls “Imagination, which comprehends, encompasses, and reconciles,” and “Rational Will, which creates or destroys blindly, and which understands only by exclusion and simplification.”

A Small Room with Large Windows contains (together with one newly-published poem) fifty of Allen Curnow's best poems selected from four previous volumes, Island and Time (1941), Sailing or Drowning (1943), At Dead Low Water (1949), and Poems, 1949-57. It omits (appropriately in such a volume) the development towards a style; but it represents fully the mature style in its various stages. The volume declares...