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The life and the work, Martin Edmond

In Fifteen Minutes You Can Say A Lot: Selected Fiction
Greville Texidor, (Kendrick Smithyman ed)
Victoria University Press, $30.00,
ISBN 9781776562268

All The Juicy Pastures: Greville Texidor And New Zealand
Margot Schwass
Victoria University Press, $40.00,
ISBN 9781776562251

In April 1970 I moved, with two other 18-year-olds, into a house at 6 Margaret Street, Ponsonby. One of us, Andrew McCartney, met a woman called Rosa and subsequently we were invited around to her place, in nearby St Mary’s Bay, to meet her father, Werner. That visit initiated a series of Tuesday night meetings during which we would sit on the floor in the front room, literally at his feet, while Werner, from an armchair in the corner, instructed us in the principles of anarchism and the methods of resistance and activism we should, as students, be using to make changes in what was then still called society. This was Werner Droescher, who fought in the Spanish Civil War, the third husband of Rosamunda’s mother, the writer Greville Texidor, who also fought in that war.

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Posted in Biography, Fiction, Literature, Non-fiction, Review

The Italian job, David Groves

Kendrick Smithyman, Campana to Montale: Versions from Italian  Jack Ross and Marco Sonzogni (eds) Novi Ligure, Edizioni Joker,€ 20.00, ISBN 9788875362645   This book is the culmination of a project which began with the 1999 publication in Landfall of seven

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Posted in Literature, Poetry, Review

Boy’s Own snapshots, Hugh Roberts

Imperial Vistas Family Fictions Kendrick Smithyman Auckland University Press, $24.95, ISBN 186940274X Last Poems  Kendrick Smithyman The Holloway Press, $65, ISBN 095823132X It’s an interesting parlour game to speculate how New Zealand’s literary history might have changed had Kendrick Smithyman

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With more to be said, Alan Riach

Atua Wera Kendrick Smithyman Auckland University Press, $34.95, ISBN 1 86940 157 3 A cynical critic, if asked whether Atua Wera should be described as Kendrick Smithyman’s masterpiece and one of New Zealand’s major poems, might reply like the Frenchman who

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Posted in Literature, Poetry, Review

Puzzling over the best way to tell it, Kendrick Smithyman

The Singing Whakapapa C K Stead Penguin Books, $24.95 In February last year C K Stead spoke to the twenty-seventh Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association congress. He called his address “Narrativity, or the Birth of the Story” and published

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Posted in Fiction, Literature, Review

Ruminative chin music, David Eggleton

Auto/Biographies Kendrick Smithyman, Auckland University Press, $19.95   This is Kendrick Smithyman’s twelfth book of poetry. It continues and restates the themes of his recent collections, Stories About Wooden Keyboards and Are you Going to the Pictures? to the point of recycling ideas and

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Posted in Literature, Poetry
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