Best Beakerful Dean Farran Productions, Christchurch, 1991, $12 Missing Parts: poems 1977-1990 Alan Loney, Hazard Press, Christchurch, 1991, $19.95 Metaphysics for Fun Ross Fraser, Dragonfly Press, Auckland, 1991, $15 Waiheke Art and Poetry Pamela Reid (ed), P O Box 202,…
Disputed Ground, Robin Hyde, Journalist Gillian Boddy and Jacqueline Matthews (eds), Victoria University Press, $34.95 A book of selected journalism seems an unlikely place to make a serious assessment of a writer. Journalism is regarded as ephemeral, lost in musty…
Milky Way Bar Bill Manhire, Victoria University Press, 1991, $16.95 Short Back and Sideways: Poems and Prose Hone Tuwhare, Godwit, 1992, $19.95 It would be hard to imagine two poets as different as Bill Manhire and Hone Tuwhare. Both are firmly…
Vladimir Nabokov: the American years Brian Boyd, Chatto and Windus, London, 1992, $59.95 The first volume of Brian Boyd’s monumental biography of Vladimir Nabokov (Vladimir Nabokov: the Russian Years, 1990) was accorded very high critical acclaim. This second volume, covering the period…
Selected Poems Vincent O’Sullivan, Oxford University Press, Auckland, 1992, $24.95 Vincent O’Sullivan’s Selected Poems provides a timely conspectus on the poetry department of this one-man literary industry. It prints twenty-four new poems with a ruthless selection of the early work – from…
Treasure Elizabeth Knox, Victoria University Press, 1992, $24.95 ‘I have come that you might have life and have it in fullness’ is a biblical quotation repeated twice in Elizabeth Knox’s latest creation, Treasure. It relates most obviously to the sheer…
A Guide to Art Galleries and Museums In New Zealand Keith W Thomson, Reed Books, Auckland, 1991, $14.95 This snappy little paperback wins out over Thomson’s earlier book in that it is cheap and portable enough to be bought and…
Feral City Rosie Scott, Reed, 1991, $24.95 Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;/ Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,/ The blood‑dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere/ The ceremony of innocence is drowned; (W B Yeats, The Second Coming) The…
Pleasures and Dangers: Artists of the 90s Trish Clark and Wystan Curnow (eds), Longman Paul, $34.95 This volume is a refreshing challenge to several assumptions that have become the dead wood of art theory and scholarship in New Zealand, and,…