Reviews - March 2019

Curnow's reach

Allen Curnow's 'Collected Poems' and Terry Sturm's 'Simply by Sailing in a New Direction'

Allen Curnow (1911­–2001) was a dominant force in New Zealand letters and became an internationally acclaimed poet, anthologist, and critic.[1] Together, the 2017 Auckland University Press poems and biography provide a substantial (1120-page!) recognition of his achievement. Let me offer what follows as a kind of searching tribute.

Unfurling futurity

A review of 'Further Problems with Pleasure'

Photo of Sandra Simonds (right) by Kira Derryberry.

Perhaps the highest praise I can say about Sandra Simonds’s Further Problems With Pleasure is that it gains deeper resonance on rereading in ways that can seduce me off of Facebook, get me off an ideological high horse (an occupational hazard), and make me want to respond in kind rather than trying to write a review that will inevitably water down the book’s intensities.