Blog Archives

Radical carrot, upside down parrot, Gregory O’Brien

Frances Hodgkins: European Journeys
Catherine Hammond and Mary Kisler (eds)
Auckland University Press, $75.00,
ISBN 9781869408930

Finding Frances Hodgkins
Mary Kisler
Massey University Press, $45.00,
ISBN 9780995102972

You reach a certain age and your favourite artists and writers start invading your dreams. In one such reverie, I am strolling through Auckland Art Gallery’s “Frances Hodgkins; European Journeys” exhibition with the poet Peter Bland. An expatriate Englishman living here – a reverse-image of Hodgkins, you could say – Peter is a similarly divided or productively bifurcated person. In my dream, he hovers upside down in the antipodean gallery, like a diver frozen just before breaking the surface of the water, or a figure in a Chagall painting. He is relaxed and looks quizzically around, as if this is a perfectly natural way to be.

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Posted in Art, Biography, Non-fiction, Review

In the hybrid zones, Airini Beautrais

How To Live
Helen Rickerby
Auckland University Press, $25.00,
ISBN 9781869409050

Ransack
essa may ranapiri
Victoria University Press, $25.00,
ISBN 9781776562374

Conventional Weapons
Tracey Slaughter
Victoria University Press, $25.00,
ISBN 9781776562206

In a literary sense, genre is problematic. While it’s convenient to categorise texts for the purposes of libraries, book awards and so on, drawing a line between poetry and fiction, fiction and non-fiction, or poetry and essay is evidently reductive and arguably somewhat pointless. Given that poetry and fiction stem from root words meaning “to make” and “to form”, historical distinctions have been primarily formal, linked to the emergence of these modes at different points in the history of writing. After 60-odd years of poetry being dominated by free verse, in which formal divisions are based on visual more than aural units, and given the perennial ubiquity of prose poetry (something of a dubious term itself), these distinctions appear narrower and less relevant.

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Posted in Literature, Poetry, Review

Challenging, touching, persuading, Janet Hughes

How I Get Ready
Ashleigh Young
Victoria University Press, $25.00,
ISBN 978176562367

The Dangerous Country Of Love And Marriage
Amy Leigh Wicks
Auckland University Press, $25.00,
ISBN 9781869408978

To The Occupant
Emma Neale
Otago University Press, $28.00,
ISBN 9781988531687

Judging a book by its cover would not be a cliché or a hazard, if so much design talent did not go into trying to make us do exactly that. Who, faced with a display of new books, has not followed the urging of the eye, probably at the expense of worthy competitors?

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Posted in Literature, Poetry, Review

Warning and consolation, Mark Houlahan

Selected Poems
Ian Wedde
Auckland University Press, $40.00,
ISBN 9781869408596

If you dine at Ian Wedde’s, the poetic indications are you’ll eat well. Among the many charms of this seductive, fatly packed Selected Poems are the number of food groups trailed before the reader, as if ready to serve. The pages are alive with pungent goat cheese and tinned ham, with green peppers and dolma, rice noodles with clams and mussels, February peaches, melons, oysters and a “pale jellied / half pear”. In some of Wedde’s poetry collections, food is more prominent than others, but the preoccupation with feasting on the good things of this earth is career-long. If you imagine a writer as a kind of chef, then Wedde is one with expertise from all over the writer’s menu: as cultural commentator and curator; as short story writer and the author of the great novella, Dick Seddon’s Great Dive; and, of course, as novelist. In all these genres, Wedde has prepared what Shakespeare calls a “great feast of language”; yet, if you allow the figure to extend, if genres were courses or food groups, it’s poetry that Wedde has served most regularly and faithfully, and it is Wedde’s status as a poet that this engaging volume presents to us so resonantly.

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Posted in Literature, Poetry, Review

Earnest but elusive, Hannah Newport-Watson

Under Glass
Gregory Kan
Auckland University Press, $25.00,
ISBN 9781869408916

It’s common to talk about the “emotional landscape” of a book. Gregory Kan’s second poetry collection Under Glass transforms that figure of speech into something more – yet not entirely – literal. A series of prose poems unfold in a landscape described as if it were a real place, with a river, a “colossal jungle” and ground that is “dry and sandy”. We move cinematically through the landscape – to a house, to the coast, to a lighthouse like a “tiny finger thrust up against the horizon”. It is an ominous, searching journey into uncharted territory reminiscent of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which Kan cites as a key source of inspiration.

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Posted in Literature, Poetry, Review

Colonial orientalism, Paula Morris

Galleries of Maoriland: Artists, Collectors and the Māori World, 1880–1910 
Roger Blackley
Auckland University Press, $75.00,
ISBN 9781869409357

The cover image of Roger Blackley’s impressive new book is a famous one: a tea break in Charles Goldie’s frame-stacked studio in 1901, Pātara Te Tuhi holding cup and saucer, his trousers and dusty boots visible below the sweep of his woven cloak. Both men seem deep in thought. Goldie – starched collar, shiny boots – was just 30, recently returned from studies in Paris; he’d seen a number of Gottfried Lindauer’s Māori portraits at the 1898–99 Auckland exhibition and begun his own rise to national fame.

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Posted in Art, History, Non-fiction, Review

“Evolution or revolution?”, Simon Upton

The New Biological Economy: How New Zealanders are Creating Value from the Land
Eric Pawson and the Biological Economies Team
Auckland University Press, $45.00,
ISBN 9781869408886

Having lived away from New Zealand for the best part of 15 years, I was delighted to read The New Biological Economy. In one fell swoop, its 13 crisp chapters brought me up to date with many very significant changes that have been transforming the land and landscapes of this country. 

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Posted in Non-fiction, Review

The games we play, Owen Mann

Sport and the New Zealanders: A History
Greg Ryan and Geoff Watson
Auckland University Press, $65.00,
ISBN 9781869408831

On Christmas Day last year, many people around the country would have ripped open a well-wrapped gift to discover a sportsperson’s biography in their hands. A popular genre in New Zealand for many decades, these publications often span the brief career of the sportsperson and the figures who have influenced their lives. This Christmas it was NBA basketball star Steven Adams and league veteran Simon Mannering that were amongst the bestsellers. These books can, at times, be interesting and perceptive, but rarely explore beyond the biographical. If they do delve into the nature of sport and why it plays such an important part in New Zealand’s culture, then it is only for the particular sport the individual has excelled at, rather than sporting activities more generally, or how sport ties into the fabric of our society and culture.

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Posted in Non-fiction, Review, Sociology, Sport

Melody slithering through the misery, Martin Lodge

Good-bye Maoriland: The Songs and Sounds of New Zealand’s Great War
Chris Bourke
Auckland University Press, $60.00,
ISBN 978869408718

For both civilians and the soldiers alike on active service during WWI, music proved a significant and enduring element of New Zealand’s war effort and war experience. This was recognised at the time: a contributor to the onboard magazine of the Opawa, a ship carrying troops to Europe, wrote in 1917 that “A ship without a musical programme is like a dog without a tail.”

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Posted in Māori, Music, Non-fiction, Review

Placing the monarchy, Stephen Levine

This Realm of New Zealand: The Sovereign, the Governor-General, the Crown
Alison Quentin-Baxter and Janet McLean
Auckland University Press, $65.00,
ISBN 9781869408756

To say that this book adds considerably to the literature about the monarchy in New Zealand would be an understatement. For those interested in the position of the Queen (and her successors) with respect to New Zealand, as well as in possible alternatives, this is an indispensable work. Produced by two distinguished scholars – Janet McLean is a professor of law at the University of Auckland; Dame Alison Quentin-Baxter has had a long career, contributing her expertise to constitutional developments in New Zealand as well as overseas – the book introduces a wealth of information not only about the role of the monarch but also about her/his representative (from 1841 the Governor; since 1917 the Governor-General), a position of significance in its own right. 

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Posted in Non-fiction, Review
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