It is given to few poets to embark upon their ninth decade with a new poem, as Allen Curnow has done with 'Investigations at the Public Baths' (pp. 22-3). The poem opens with a proud commemorative inscription, swiftly followed by questions as to just whose survival is being celebrated here--the poet's, or the Poet's? Other than the formal announcement, there is little in this poem to say that the writer is 80 years old. Alert as ever to what his senses deliver, he is also hard at work writing his poem--this one, or another, as
