New Zealand was an occasional and distant fascination to me when I was young. I had read 'Mrs Bathurst', Kipling's extraordinary and eerie story about the loneliness of the old Empire and the unexpected reaching of hands across the sea. I had read Dan Davin and the pieces in John Lehmann's Penguin New Writing. When I left school and joined up I met a good many New Zealand soldiers. I read most of the Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse when it came out; and it sold a remarkable number of copies in England. With my wife Iris Murdoch I did some visiting, chiefly in the South Island, for the British Council. More recently I have seen The Piano. Oxford, where I teach, is full of New Zealanders in every faculty, with several in English from the University of Otago. Such qualifications, if you can call them that, get me nowhere, I find, when it comes to understanding, as well as merely liking, Allen Curnow's poetry. The paradox is one of the outsider trying to feel at home in the poetry of a country with, as Curnow wrote, 'never a soul at home', with a history and an 'unhistory'. Probably only New Zealanders can recognise home in this poetry. Is it true the question of 'home' only crops up when there isn't one? Nobody bothers about 'feeling at home' in European or American poetry: the question doesn't arise.
