Necessary Secrets
Greg McGee
Upstart Press, $38.00,
ISBN 9781988516639
Loving Sylvie
Elizabeth Smither
Allen and Unwin, $37.00,
ISBN 9781988547114
Two recently-published novels explore inter-generational stories, yet there couldn’t be two more different treatments.
page.stone.leaf
Dinah Hawken (drawings by John Edgar)
The Holloway Press
ISBN 9780986461880
Ruby Duby Du
Elizabeth Smither (Kathryn Madill illus)
The Cold Hub Press
ISBN 9780473268305
Gathering Evidence
Caoilinn Hughes
Victoria University Press
ISBN 9780864739261
On opening Dinah Hawken’s latest volume of poetry, one is struck by its materiality: for a volume of such spare poems, it is a heavy book, a beautiful thing. This sense of the material is evident also in the impressions made by the letterpress-printed words in the pulp of the cut pages. Nostalgia materialises, one might say, in the page’s imperfect absorption of the ink, suggestive of a saturated past all but lost except for its tracing in these spectral letter-figures that, ruin-like (or like the runes of John Edgar’s accompanying stone rubbings), evoke the fullness of the world and all its constituting otherness through their very imperfection.
The Yellow Buoy C K Stead Auckland University Press, $28.00, ISBN 9781869407353 The Blue Coat Elizabeth Smither Auckland University Press, $25.00, ISBN 9781869407360 Collected Poems 1956-2011 Peter Bland Steele Roberts, $46.00, ISBN 9781877577994 These writers are past their three-score-and-ten –…
Your Unselfish Kindness: Robin Hyde’s Autobiographical Writings Mary Edmond-Paul (ed) Otago University Press, $40.00, ISBN 9781877578212 It’s natural in a densely-packed book to look at the photographs first. Robin Hyde was intensely interested in houses and rooms and their…
The Commonplace Book: A Writer’s Journey Through Quotations Elizabeth Smither Auckland University Press, $34.99, ISBN 9781869404765 How the Land Lies: Of Longing and Belonging Pat White Victoria University Press, $35.00, ISBN 9780864736383 “[A] memoir is how one remembers one’s own…
Lola Elizabeth Smither Penguin Books, $30.00, ISBN 9780143203650 Elizabeth Smither’s last novel was called Different Kinds of Pleasure, and its title offers a clue to the approach she takes in her fiction, and also to what she expects of her…
Pebbles at the window, Elizabeth Smither
Elizabeth Smither urges writers to recognise the rewards of rejection. I once spoke to a writer who assured me he had never had a rejection slip. Years later I met an editor who told me he had received frequent submissions…
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