The moon rolls over the roof and falls behind
my house, and the moon does neither of these things,
I am talking about myself. . . .
. . .A long moment stretches, the next one is not
on time. Not unaccountably the chill of
the planking underfoot rises
in the throat, for its part the night sky empties
the whole of its contents down. Turn on a bare
heel, close the door behind
on the author, cringing demiurge, who picks up
his litter and his tools and paces me back
to bed, stealthily in step.


from `Continuum'
        

New Zealand poet Allen Curnow, described by Peter Porter as
`this modern master', collects here for the first time the poems he has written since 1989, together with the greater part of the poetry of the half century preceding.
`He has been a major voice at every stage of his career . . . knowing what he is about, moving at his own pace, inventive, unpredictable, writing poetry which strikes me, as it has done serially over the years, as unsurpassed by the work of any other poet at present writing in
English,' C.K. Stead wrote in the London Review of Books.