Blog Archives
Editorial – Issue 50
No, not sour grapes People will always bitch about literary awards, and literary awards will always seem inherently unfair. This year’s Montana New Zealand Book Awards will have thrown up their share of sniping, backbiting and dis-appointed egos. Some…
Irony and automata, Bill Sewell
Husk Chris Price Auckland University Press, $21.95, ISBN 1869402669 I suppose it’s as true to say that you shouldn’t judge a book by its title as by its cover. Certainly, when it comes to some otherwise admirable collections of New…
Tagged with: Auckland University Press, Bill Sewell, Chris Price, Issue 55, Spring 2001
Posted in Literature, Poetry, Review
Posted in Literature, Poetry, Review
Editorial – Issue 55
Enemies of promise “Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.” That was Cyril Connolly in 1938, warning of the dangers threatening writers of the time. More specifically, in his ground-breaking part-memoir, part-critical volume Enemies of Promise,…
Editorial – Issue 49
Two cheers for biography Biography doesn’t always get a good press. It has been Said to have “added a new terror to death”, while Oscar Wilde remarked that “[e]very great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is always Judas…
Editorial – Issue 54
Largesse for literature Over the last four-and-a-half years, New Zealand Books has kept a watching brief on the Government’s performance vis-à-vis the Arts. After Jenny Shipley became Prime Minister in 1997, we expressed the rather vain hope that she would…
Moments of invention, Bill Sewell
The Stepmother Tree James McNaughton Darius Press, $14.95, ISBN 0473078244 I don’t think there is such a thing as a “stepmother tree”. My Shorter Oxford hasn’t heard of it anyway. But if a stepmother tree has never existed, then perhaps…
Tagged with: Autumn 2001, Bill Sewell, Darius Press, Issue 53, James McNaughton
Posted in Literature, Poetry, Review
Posted in Literature, Poetry, Review
Editorial – Issue 53
“Impersonal sympathy” The Times Literary Supplement recently celebrated its centenary, and used the occasion to print two substantial essays – one by Ferdinand Mount, its current editor, the other by Stefan Collini – on its history, editorial policy, style, and…
Editorial – Issue 52
A large variety of all the same? The late Allen Curnow was fond of quoting Yeats’s dictum that the real test of poets lies in how they deal with sex and death. Perhaps not surprisingly, both subjects loom memorably…
Objects in a landscape, Bill Sewell
The Art of Grahame Sydney Grahame Sydney and contributors Longacre Press, $99.95, ISBN 1 877135 31 3 The Central Otago I know does not figure much in Grahame Sydney’s art. The particular area I remember best is the Strath Taieri,…
Tagged with: Bill Sewell, Grahame Sydney, Issue 44, Longacre Press
Posted in Art, Non-fiction, Review
Posted in Art, Non-fiction, Review
Erebus in the frame, Lydia Wevers
Erebus: a poem Bill Sewell Hazard Press, $21.95, ISBN 1 877161 46 2 Is Erebus one of those events like Gallipoli, a bloodied trench, an oil stain in the white wastes of our forgetting? Like most people I remember where…