Blog Archives

Poetry and politics, Sarah Sharp

Robert Burns: Poet and Revolutionist Harry Holland (Dougal McNeill ed) Steele Roberts, $30.00, ISBN 9780947493172 Writing during the 1920s, Harry Holland describes the celebration of Burns Night as an event which unites Scots around the world: be the Scot where…
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Posted in Literature, Poetry, Review

Hipster pulp, Dougal McNeill

New Hokkaido James McNaughton Victoria University Press, $30.00, ISBN 978 086473 9766 James McNaughton’s New Hokkaido is not the “adventure that thrills and disquiets at every turn” promised in its blurb, but it does qualify as a page-turner: I read…
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Posted in Fiction, Literature, Review

Constant uncertainty, Dougal McNeill

Journals 1938-1945 Charles Brasch Margaret Scott (transcriber), Andrew Parsloe (annotator) Otago University Press, $60.00, ISBN 9781877372841 Enduring Legacy, the Hocken Library’s 2003 exhibition marking the release of Charles Brasch’s papers from their embargo, was subtitled “patron, poet and collector”. Brasch…
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Posted in Essays, Non-fiction, Poetry, Review

A pleasing oddness, Dougal McNeill

Letters of Frank Sargeson Sarah Shieff (ed) Vintage, $50.00, ISBN 9781869793333 Karatani Kojin, announcing the “end of modern Japanese literature” in 2004, caused some alarm amongst readers, despite Japan’s (for us, and comparatively) philosophically open-minded and expansive literary culture. Weren’t…
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Posted in Letters, Non-fiction, Review

Life in the bush, by the bay, Dougal McNeill

Speaking Frankly: The Frank Sargeson Memorial Lectures 2003-2010 Sarah Shieff (ed) Cape Catley, $31.99, ISBN 9781877340277   Celebrating Katherine Mansfield: A Centenary Volume of Essays Gerri Kimber and Janet Wilson (eds) Palgrave Macmillan, $162.00, ISBN 9780230277731   It was a…
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Posted in Essays, Lecture, Literature, Non-fiction, Review

Not all freckles and nostalgia, Dougal McNeill

The Movie May Be Slightly Different Vincent O’Sullivan Victoria University Press, $30.00, ISBN 97800864736437   Adorno’s term for those last, wild works of Beethoven’s was “late style”, describing a maturity that is for the most part not round, but furrowed…
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Posted in Literature, Poetry, Review

Being a bard, Dougal McNeill

Selected Poems of James K Baxter Paul Millar (ed) Auckland University Press, $40.00, ISBN 9781869404611 Maurice Shadbolt called Baxter “a Bard, our only one”. It’s unusual now to read the term used without irony or self-consciously distancing care; but, with…
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Posted in Literature, Poetry, Review

Had experience, missed meaning, Dougal McNeill

Plume of Bees: A Literary Biography of C K Stead Judith Dell Panny Cape Catley, $39.99, ISBN 9781877340239 Modernism, born in the era of wars and revolutions, grew on contradiction. Centred in London, none of its greatest writers were English.…
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Posted in Biography, Non-fiction, Review

Steadfast, Dougal McNeill

Collected Poems 1951-2006 C K Stead Auckland University Press, $59.99,  ISBN 9781869404185 The American critic Lionel Trilling, writing in the early 1960s of his experience teaching what we would now call modernist literature, felt unsettled by the ease with which…
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Posted in Literature, Poetry, Review

From Pine Hill to elsewhere, Dougal McNeill

Geography for the Lost Kapka Kassabova Auckland University Press, $25.00,  ISBN 9781869403874  Made for Weather Kay McKenzie Cooke University of Otago Press, $29.95,  ISBN 9781877372490 84-484 Geoff Cochrane Victoria University Press, $25.00,  ISBN 9780864735584 Cold Snack Janet Charman Auckland University…
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Posted in Literature, Poetry, Review
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