The Book Reviewer His tatty raincoat conceals a country, rolled-up sleeves reveal many wristwatches. He airily waves away rainbows of neckties and pulls a smoke from a dark pocket. But his book-side manner is a corrupt text, for, though…
Dog: Poems C K Stead Auckland University Press, $21.95, ISBN 1869402863 Amongst our intelligentsia the bald dome of C K Stead looms large. In the identity parade of contemporary New Zealand culture, he is one of those controversialists, one of…
Pacific Art Niu Sila: the Pacific Dimension of Contemporary New Zealand Arts ed Sean Mallon and Pandora Fulimalo Pereira Te Papa Press,$49.95, ISBN 0909010838 Robert Louis Stevenson, writing about Samoan culture over a century ago, expressed it thus: No occasion…
Collected Poems 1967-1999 Bill Manhire Victoria University Press, ISBN 086473411 (paperback), $34.95 ISBN 0864734212 (hardback) $49.95 In this Collected Poems, the private universe of Bill Manhire is made readily available to his ever-increasing audience. But it may take years and many readings…
Rhyming Planet David Eggleton Steele Roberts, $19.95, ISBN 1877228567 Clearances Alan Riach Hazard Press, $21.95, ISBN 18772700705 Acetylene Geoff Cochrane Victoria University Press, $24.95, ISBN 0864734190 David Eggleton, street entertainer, licensed to rave, appears in a surprisingly subdued pose on…
Positively George Street: a personal history of Sneaky Feelings and the Dunedin Sound Matthew Bannister Reed Books, $34.95, ISBN 0 7900 0704 5 The mythology tells us that Dunedin in the 1970s was a studious, quiet backwater, seemingly permanently becalmed…
Queen Salote of Tonga Elizabeth Wood-Ellem Auckland University Press, $69.95, ISBN 1 86940 205 7 Tonga-watchers will know that there is a fairytale aspect to Tonga: this miniature kingdom by the sea containing a whole society in microcosm is a…
Speaking in Colour Sean Mallon and Pandora Fulimalo Pereira Te Papa Press, $39.95 ISBN 0 90901044 7 The country of the tourist brochures is, as Nadine Gordimer has suggested, always someone else’s country: unreal in its airbrushed perfection; its beckoning…
Return to Sender Wira Gardiner Reed, $24.95, ISBN 0 140 25676 8 Nga Pepa a Ranginui — The Walker Papers Ranginui Walker Penguin, $29.95, ISBN 0 7900 0460 7 All festivals are acts of collective myth-making, chances for a nation to…