In 2014 Anne Kennedy was selected as the Going West Books and Writers Festival Curnow Reader, a gala night honour bestowed each year on a poet of prominence. 

Anne speaks of what poet Allen Curnow’s work means to her as both a reader and a writer, commenting that his work grappled with the particularity of place, of history and imagination.  

Appropriately she begins with Curnow’s much-loved poem The Loop in Lone Kauri Road and follows with two narrative poems from her book The Darling North, which won the 2013 New Zealand Post Book Award for poetry.  

Reading the poem, The Darling North, and Hello Kitty Goodbye Piccadilly, Kennedy’s style is lyrical, haunting and masterful. With great eloquence and cadence, she explores themes of love, loss, the land, searching for place and feeling out of place, the past and present, and of ‘here-ness’. It is a magnificently crafted performance by one of New Zealand’s finest living poets.

Anne’s recital of The Loop in Lone Kauri Road by Allen Curnow is released here by kind permission of Tim Curnow, Sydney, the copyright owner of the poem.