استكشف المجموعة الواسعة من العناوين المتاحة.

'I don't believe in God, but I miss Him' goes the opening sentence of Julian Barnes's 'Nothing To Be Frightened Of' (2008), his part-memoir, part-disquisition on thanatophobia. Barnes’s line might provide a fitting epigraph, even a ' fitting tribute', to Terry Sturm's recent biography of Allen Curnow and / or to the new collected edition of his poems edited by Elizabeth Caffin and Sturm. Because the question I want to begin to explore is what happens if we think of the Methuselah of New Zealand poetry as a 'post-Christian' poet?

To think of First World War poets writing in English is not to think of the New Zealanders Donald H. Lea and Alfred Clark. The names that inevitably come to mind are those of the same ten or so much-anthologised, much-venerated, much-biographied English poets: Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke, Edward Thomas, Robert Graves, Isaac Rosenberg, David Jones, Ivor Gurney, Charles Sorley, Edmund Blunden - perhaps a few others. Equally inevitable are the titles of particular poems: ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’, ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, ‘Strange Meeting’, ‘Base Details’, ‘The General’, ‘The Soldier’, ‘As the Team’s Head Brass’, ‘Lights Out’, ‘A Dead Boche’, ‘Break of Day in the Trenches’, ‘Dead Man’s Dump’, In Parenthesis, ‘To His Love’, ‘The Silent One’, ‘When you see millions of the mouthless dead’, ‘Report on Experience’. To which might be added Kipling’s ‘My Boy Jack’, ‘Gethsemane’, and some of his ‘Epitaphs of the War’.

'I don't believe in God, but I miss Him' goes the opening sentence of Julian Barnes's 'Nothing To Be Frightened Of' (2008), his part-memoir, part-disquisition on thanatophobia. Barnes's line might provide a fitting epigraph, even a ' fitting tribute', to Terry Sturm's recent biography of Allen Curnow and / or to the new collected edition of his poems edited by Elizabeth Caffin and Sturm. Because the question I want to begin to explore is what happens if we think of the Methuselah of New Zealand poetry as a 'post-Christian' poet?

To think of First World War poets writing in English is not to think of the New Zealanders Donald H. Lea and Alfred Clark. The names that inevitably come to mind are those of the same ten or so much-anthologised, much-venerated, much-biographied English poets: Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke, Edward Thomas, Robert Graves, Isaac Rosenberg, David Jones, Ivor Gurney, Charles Sorley, Edmund Blunden - perhaps a few others. Equally inevitable are the titles of particular poems: 'Dulce et Decorum Est', 'Anthem for Doomed Youth', 'Strange Meeting', 'Base Details', 'The General', 'The Soldier', 'As the Team's Head Brass', 'Lights Out', 'A Dead Boche', 'Break of Day in the Trenches', 'Dead Man's Dump', In Parenthesis, 'To His Love', 'The Silent One', 'When you see millions of the mouthless dead', 'Report on Experience'. To which might be added Kipling's 'My Boy Jack', 'Gethsemane', and some of his 'Epitaphs of the War'.

Wrestling with the Angel: a Life of Janet Frame Michael King. London: Picador, 2001. Pp 592. -06. 00. ISBN 0330352768.