SOURCE: Wallace-Crabbe, Chris. “That Second Body: An Australian View of Allen Curnow's Progress.” Ariel 16, no. 4 (October 1985): 67-75.

In the following essay, Wallace-Crabbe provides an overview of Curnow's development as a poet—and of the author as a reader—noting the poetry's “excited intelligence” and “joy in rootedness.”

It is easy for me to remember when and where I first saw a poem by Allen Curnow. After my father came back from the War, back from his years in Asia early in 1946, he bought several copies of John Lehmann's Penguin New Writing: unusual objects in a household—flat-hold, rather—starved of modern poetry except for the narratives of Stephen Vincent Benet. In Penguin New Writing number twenty-seven, published in April of that year, there were some good modern poems. Three were by Louis Macneice and one of these three, “Carrick Revisited,” might fairly be regarded (to refine a suggestion...