Early Days Yet

It is good that Curnow allowed a filmmaker as deft and careful as [Shirley] Horrocks to finally tell us about him . . . While a raft of fellow poets has lined up to praise and explain, Horrocks has mostly chosen to let her subject, through his words, memories and presence, acquaint us with who he was and what he means.

– Reviewer Greg Dixon in The NZ Herald, 4 October 2001

He’s important I think to just about every poet in New Zealand as a kind of example of the absolute commitment to the life, rather than the commitment to the image, which I think is a slightly different thing. There are plenty of people running around committed to the image of the poet; there are plenty of bad Lord Byrons around not doing the stuff. and there he is doing it and doing it, and doing it.

– Poet Bill Manhire on the example set by Allen Curnow

I feel safer on a platform reading a poem than I do any other kind of public appearance  . . .  I can put on the poem  . . .  perhaps like a kind of mask. I can wear the poem as it were...

– Allen Curnow on feeling safe behind a poem

All poems are rash acts. 

– Allen Curnow, as quoted on the Christchurch City Council Libraries website

As you'll see I don’t have a large private library. I have what to me are essentials for a poet’s own shelves. The books, for one reason or another, have stuck to me or I’ve stuck to them over a good many years, and they’re useful. I need to have them around me.

– Poet Allen Curnow on his library, early in this documentary

It was as if no one had quite seen New Zealand in the English language until Curnow saw it.

– Writer CK Stead on Allen Curnow's influence on New Zealand literature, The Poetry Archive website

He’s as much a New Zealander as any famous All Black or opera singer or anything like that. He’s become a total New Zealander really, just by staying here and working, and holding to what he believes . . . having a strong sense of identity I think, right from the very earliest poems…

– Poet Elizabeth Smither on Allen Curnow

Extraordinary things happen every day in our street. Only this morning, the ground opened at my feet without warning. Unless it was a cloud in the south, balled, like a swelling in the mouth…

– Allen Curnow reads the opening stanza of his poem 'Any Time Now'