Blog Archives

Letter from Auckland, Iain Sharp

Earlier this year I was asked to write a short profile of Maurice Gee for Pacific Way, the Air New Zealand in-flight magazine. This involved a long-distance call from the Pacific Way office in Auckland to Gee’s home in Wellington

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Posted in Non-fiction, Opinion

Poem — Anne French

The poetry reading at the end of the world   It is a very big anthology. Everyone in the world who ever wrote a poem is in it. I am, as it happens, represented by something I’d rather forget (that’s

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Posted in Poem

Green thoughts, Judith Dale

The Garden as a Room: Decorating and Furnishing the New Zealand Garden Robin Shafer, Random House, $39.95 The Dry Garden: Gardening with drought-tolerant plants Jane Taylor, Godwit, $59.95 Delights of Floral Languages, Delights of Lavender, Delights of Little Flowers, Delights

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Posted in Natural History, Non-fiction, Review

The loneliness of the short distance columnist, A K Grant

5 Days in Las Vegas Raybon Kan, Daphne Brasell Associates Press, $29.95   I must confess to a personal grievance in relation to this book, a collection of pieces, mostly from the Dominion or the Listener, by the gifted young

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Posted in Essays, Non-fiction, Review

Poem — Alex Scobie

  Grandfather   Gentle keeper of bees, with walrus Moustache stained by pipe smoke; Falkirk miner, half-blind, Burrowing and blasting shafts Through the Carboniferous Age, Illuminating with his Davy lamp Friezes of centipedes and ferns, Dead a million years ago,

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Posted in Poem

Fish and Slips, R M McDowall

The Rock Pool Fishes of New Zealand: Te ika aaria o Aotearoa Chris Paulin and Clive Roberts, Museum of New Zealand, Te Papa Tongarewa, $49.95 This is a beautiful book. For decades, people interested in rock pool fauna and flora

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Posted in Natural History, Non-fiction, Review

Narrow focus, Brian Easton

Corporatisation and privatisation: New Zealand Ian Duncan and Alan Bollard, Oxford University Press, $29.95   The preface of this book states ‘the work is based originally on an unpublished study of thirteen state enterprises, commissioned by the New Zealand Treasury

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Posted in Non-fiction, Politics & Law, Review

Poem — Vincent O’Sullivan

In time of thanks and praise   My friend Judith’s house is so instructively wired that when she lights her 19th century ornamental lamp for one of her elegant, thoughtful dinners, the flame hisses when a man says so much as

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Posted in Poem

Snow White revisited, Malcolm MacLean

Handy Hints for Wicked Stepmothers: New Zealand Step-Parenting in the ’90s Nicola Lynch-Reeves, GP Books, price not given Pamela Trowel, a thirty-something slave of New York has just acquired, quite unintentionally, a child. Abdhul – maybe six, maybe nine, maybe

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Posted in Non-fiction, Review, Sociology

Electoral debate, Jonathan Boston

Taking it to the People? The New Zealand Electoral Referendum Debate, Alan McRobie (ed), Hazard Press, $29.95 This book is about the continuing debate over electoral reform in New Zealand. It brings together a wide array of material (all of

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Posted in Non-fiction, Politics & Law, Review, Sociology
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