Yearly Archives: 1993

A variety of voices, Mark Williams

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,

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Posted in Literature, Poetry, Review

Wrenched from the alphabet, Mark Williams

Iain Sharp and I were contemporaries in the English department at Auckland University in the early 1970s. In the first year of our masters programme we collaborated on a series of parodies of the poems that had appeared in Arthur

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Posted in Comment, Literature, Poetry

New confidence and authority, Jane Stafford

Seven Days on Mykonos Anne French, Auckland University Press, $19.95 To know who you are, you have to have a place to come from, says Seamus Heaney. But if you are a New Zealander, you also have to have a

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Posted in Literature, Poetry, Review

What gives it meaning? Anne French

The Tudor Style Elizabeth Smither, Auckland University Press, $19.95 Guardians, not Angels Stephen Oliver, Hazard Press, $19.95 Distances Rob Jackaman, Hazard Press, $19.95 Days Beside Water Gregory O’Brien, Auckland University Press, $19.95 Malachi Gregory O’Brien, Little Esther Books, $13.00, available

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Posted in Literature, Poetry, Review

Who are the intruders? Brian Turner

Dark of the Moon and Beak of the Moon, Philip Temple, Penguin, each $24.95 Sailor, explorer, writer, mountaineer: Philip Temple was all of those things when I first met him in the 1970s. Originally from England ‑ he emigrated as

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Posted in Fiction, Literature, Review

Revelling in the actuality of the past, Ralph Johnson

The House of Strife Maurice Shadbolt, Hodder and Stoughton, $39.95   Life is no uniform uninterrupted march or flow. It is a thing of histories, each with its own plot, its inception and movement towards its close. – John Dewey,

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Posted in Fiction, Literature, Review

A radical notion, Sharon Crosbie

Lives on Fire Rosie Scott, Sceptre New Zealand, $19.95 All the Nice Girls Barbara Anderson, Victoria University Press, $24.95 It had to happen, I guess. It seems just yesterday that we were standing in bookshops, spellbound at the sight of

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Posted in Fiction, Literature, Review

Fiction, history and art of displacement, Brian Edwards

Let the River Stand Vincent O’Sullivan, Penguin, $24.95 Amongst conceptions of history, at least in its articulations with fiction and with postmodernism as perception of a contemporary cultural movement, grand narratives of human progress give way to local detail, to

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Posted in Fiction, Literature, Review

Unacknowledged legislators, Diane Hebley

Zigzag William Taylor (ed), Penguin, $19.95 Slide the Corner Fleur Beale, Ashton Scholastic Take Me to Your Leaders Gaelyn Gordon, Tui Harper/Collins, $14.95 Those who support New Zealand literature for children and young adults have always claimed the justification for

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Posted in Children, Fiction, Literature, Review, Young adults

Amidst the bric-à-brac, Harvey McQueen

Writing a New Country:  A collection of essays presented to E H McCormick in his 88th year James Ross, Linda Gill and Stuart McRae (eds), privately published, James Ross, 495 Richmond Rd, Grey Lynn, Auckland Of Pavlova, Poetry and Paradigms:

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Posted in Essays, Literature, Review
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