Book Book Fiona Farrell Vintage, $26.95, ISBN 1869416198 I associate being in Christchurch with knowing Fiona Farrell. Both of us came down from provincial North Island cities, Hamilton and Palmerston North, in the early 1990s. I came to teach in…
Surfaces of Strangeness: Janet Frame and the Rhetoric of Madness Simone Oettli-van Delden Victoria University Press, $39.95, ISBN 0864734565 Albert Wendt and Pacific Literature: Circling the Void Paul Sharrad Auckland University Press, $44.99, ISBN 1869403037 For a supposedly puritanical country…
Chemistry Damien Wilkins Victoria University Press, $29.95, ISBN 0864734271 In a 1913 guide book, Forest and Ice, Blanche Baughan describes the Franz Josef glacier: “the grandeur of great, ordained descent, embodied here in a white stairway of the gods, magnificently…
The Writer at Work: Essays C K Stead Otago University Press, $39.95, ISBN 1877133957 I write on a Waitangi Day on which the Prime Minister has chosen to attend celebrations in Wellington and Auckland but not at Waitangi. The…
This House Has Three Walls Lloyd Jones Victoria University Press, $19.95, ISBN 0 86473 321 6 There is a story, possibly apocryphal, that during World War II some captured Japanese prisoners were taken by train from Auckland to the Wairarapa…
An Anthology of New Zealand Poetry in English ed Jenny Bornholdt, Gregory O’Brien and Mark Williams Oxford University Press, $49.95, ISBN 0 19 558338 8 “I cannot think that real poets have any competition,” wrote Blake. But we lesser mortals…
The Source of the Song. New Zealand Writers on Catholicism Mark Williams (ed) Auckland University Press, $24.95 ISBN 086473 2872 Catholicism as a “cultural force”? Andrew Johnston very properly has trouble with the whole notion of a separable entity. Anne…
100 New Zealand Poems Bill Manhire (ed), Godwit, $29.95 Some years ago I edited a small anthology of New Zealand poetry. It was a truly hellish experience. Some poets wanted to know how much space had been given to rivals,…
How many cultures make a culture? Mark Williams
Australians have been encouraged over the last decade to identify their economic destiny with Asia. Their last Prime Minister even had a habit of pointing to maps and proclaiming that Australia was part of Asia. The cultural and economic redirections…
Posted in Comment, Non-fiction