Nothing but Grass and Wind: The Rutherfords of North Canterbury Janet Holm, Hazard Press, $59.95 The Voyage of the ‘May Queen’ Margaret Drake Brockman, Merlin Books, price not given In 1859 George Rutherford bought the lease of a largish…
Nothing but Grass and Wind: The Rutherfords of North Canterbury Janet Holm, Hazard Press, $59.95 The Voyage of the ‘May Queen’ Margaret Drake Brockman, Merlin Books, price not given In 1859 George Rutherford bought the lease of a largish…
Witi Ihimaera: A Changing Vision Umelo Ojinmah, University of Otago Press, $24.95 I Have What I Gave: The Fiction of Janet Frame Judith Dell Panny, Daphne Brasell Associates Press, $34.95 Signs are that New Zealand literature is in good…
Natural Healing in New Zealand Chris Cooper, Random House, $24.95 Whether it be the result of successive governments tinkering with the National Health system or the much heralded coming of the Age of Aquarius, the fact is that in…
Musica Ficta Anne Kennedy, Auckland University Press, $24.95 Now, to the scandal of men, women are prophesying. So runs the epigraph of Anne Kennedy’s Musica Ficta, though quite what scandal the novel involves remains a puzzle. In so far as it frames…
The Good Tourist and the Laughing Cadaver Michael Gifkins (ed) Vintage, 1993, $24.95 Visiting a library in Timbuktu, an actual town in the central west African country of Mali, the Australian writer Murray Bail is told by an Islamic…
The New Place; The Poetry of Settlement in New Zealand, 1852-1914 Harvey McQueen, Victoria University Press, $29.95 New Zealand poetry begins with Ursula Bethell. Before her there were scribblers, versifiers, poetasters, bombasts, jinglists and hobbyists, but there were no…
A Distraction of Opposites Sandra Arnold, Hazard Press, Christchurch, $24.95 The front cover illustration of A Distraction of Opposites is a painting by Heather Busch entitled ‘Look at the Pattern.’ At first glance, what you see is ordinary objects on top…
How to Talk Andrew Johnston, Victoria University Press, $19.95 Piki Ake! Robert Sullivan, Auckland University Press, $19.95 I was given these two books to review with the instruction that I should look at them in the wider context of…