Blog Archives

On the beat, Neil Cameron

A Policeman’s Paradise? Policing a Stable Society, 1918-1945 Graeme Dunstall Dunmore Press in association with the Historical Branch, Department of Internal Affairs, $49.95, ISBN 0864693567   This (large) volume is the fourth in the “official” history of the New Zealand

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Posted in History, Non-fiction, Politics & Law, Review

Poem – David Eggleton

Late-Model Import-Export Cultural Recycling Poem   The golden cherubim of twenty-two turn into promises of middle age, locked inside a gilded cage. Jumping Jack Weta is growing rhubarb in the suburbs; Academies of Yahoos offer Diplomas in Primal Urges. Maybe

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Poem – Elizabeth Smither

A dentist’s view of heaven   No drill, no syringes, no mouth washes no cotton padding like tiny bolsters no excavating a tooth like a collapsed house in which at the bottom remains like a family safe in a doodlebug

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From the University of Suffering, Joe Bennett

Julia Moore : Julia Moore P.I. Penguin, $24.95, ISBN 0140293833 Lauren Roche: Bent Not Broken Steele Roberts, $24.95, ISBN 1877228338   These are the stories of two New Zealand women who have triumphed over circumstance. Neither story makes cheerful reading for a

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Posted in Autobiography, Non-fiction, Review

Poem – James Brown

The Crickets   We came creeping out the cracks hot summer nights at the local swimming pool like black, anti-cicadas of the night, our exotic chirps a skimpy advert for the sins we hoped would be forthcoming. We sucked in

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Overlapping associations, Tom Larkin

Japan and New Zealand, 150 Years ed Roger Peren New Zealand Centre for Japanese Studies, Massey University, in association with the Historical Branch, Department of Internal Affairs, [not for sale], ISBN 0958350574   In 1878, Asajiro Noda, the eight-year-old son

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Posted in History, Non-fiction, Pacific, Review, War

“A genius for upholstery”, Kim Hill

Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady: such an adolescent cliché, you could say, not to mention a literary one. Spirited young thing falls in thrall to a superficially sophisticated older man, and ruins her life. The Victorians were apparently

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Posted in Imprints

I remember, I remember, Jane Bowron

The High Jump: A New Zealand Childhood  Elizabeth Knox Victoria University Press, $24.95, ISBN 0864733372   Anyone who grew up in New Zealand in the 1960s and ’70s can bask in the nostalgia of Elizabeth Knox’s trilogy The High Jump

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Posted in Fiction, Literature, Review

Language and loss, John Dickson

laminations Murray Edmond Auckland University Press, $19.95, ISBN 1869402227 In the poem “Can that Mango” from Murray Edmond’s latest book, the following lines are spoken (or so a note informs us) by one of two angels who are discussing a

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Posted in Literature, Poetry, Review

Poem – Roma Potiki

Doña Musica  for Julia Varley   The butterflies that have come out of the garden of the kaosmos flutter behind each of the ears of Doña Musica. Doña Musica is a character and she is not. She is herself and

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