An Incorrigible Music - A Sequence of Poems

Published by Auckland University Press and Oxford University Press, 1979, 52 pages.

I hope I have not finished yet, Allen Curnow remarked in his Note to the 'Collected Poems' of 1974. Now, with these powerful new poems, he keeps that promise. Filled as they are with images of violent death, of murder as if inherent in the order of things natural, human, and divine - and the death-struggle of mind and matter - these poems are no less (as CK Stead wrote about Curnow in the 'sixties) engaged in affirming life and a world that is real. Of their immediacy, it need only be noted that the greater part was written and arranged as a sequence during a period of intense activity in 1977 and the New Zealand summer of 1977-78, when the terrible events which are the subject for its completion had yet to occur.