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

Mystery, wisdom and complication, Gregory O’Brien

The Lives of Coat Hangers Sudesh Mishra University of Otago Press, $25.00, ISBN 9781927322376 “A thing is a hole in a thing it is not.” I was reminded of American sculptor Carl Andre’s words, as I read Sudesh Mishra’s remarkable

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Posted in Literature, Poetry, Review

Obituary — Campbell Smith

The world a stage

Gregory O’Brien recalls the life and work of artist and writer Campbell Smith (1925-2015)

The last time I saw Campbell Smith was in June a year ago. Friends from around the country had gathered at Hamilton’s Meteor Theatre to celebrate his life’s work and watch a performance of his play, Ida and I (aka Quite a Woman), a doco-drama – if such a thing can exist onstage – about the Waikato painter and arts-advocate, Ida Carey. It was both a glorious and a traumatic occasion.

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Reading, writing and arithmetic, Barbara Else

Speed of Light
Joy Cowley
Gecko Press, $20.00,
ISBN 9781877579936

Teddy One-Eye: The Autobiography of a Teddy Bear
Gavin Bishop
Random House, $35.00,
ISBN 9781775537274

The ACB with Honora Lee
Kate De Goldi (drawings by Gregory O’Brien)
Longacre, $25.00,
ISBN 9781869799915

Three stars of New Zealand literature, three award-winning books, three very different approaches and audiences: how is any reviewer to manage this daunting assignment?

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Posted in Children, Fiction, Literature, Review

Moments of transcendence, Elizabeth Crayford

Otherwise
John Dennison
Auckland University Press, $30.00,
ISBN 9781869408282

The Art of Excavation
Leilani Tamu
Anahera Press, $25.00,
ISBN 9780473290047

Whale Years
Gregory O’Brien
Auckland University Press, $28.00,
ISBN 9781869408329

The cover of John Dennison’s Otherwise features a photograph of what at first looks like a hand-blown light bulb and which bears a striking resemblance to a human head. It is, in fact, a photograph of that scientific curiosity: a light mill. Never heard of it? Neither had I, but the second poem in this, Dennison’s first collection, “Crooke’s Radiometer”, is clearly a description of this object: “the bright form / of the skull …. a partial vacuum …. a spike, / obsessive pivot around which the vanes hum”. Invented in 1873, a light mill consists of a set of vanes in a partial vacuum which rotate when exposed to light. To the lay person, a seeming anomaly, an impossibility: a perpetual motion engine; for scientific explanations, see Dr Google.

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Posted in Literature, Poetry, Review

Fireflies in the twilight, Gregory O’Brien

Painter and poet Gregory O’Brien reflects on Jean Arp’s Collected French Writings. i was born in nature … i have four natures. i have two things. i have five senses. sense and non-sense. nature is senseless. make way for nature.

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Posted in Imprints

Travels and clippings, Nadine France

Graft Helen Heath Victoria University Press, $28.00, ISBN 9780864737762   Beauties of the Octagonal Pool Gregory O’Brien Auckland University Press, $28.00, ISBN 9781869405793   Just Then Harry Ricketts Victoria University Press, $25.00, ISBN 9780864738226   To graft is “to fix

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Posted in Literature, Poetry, Review

A cabinet of curiosities, Stella Ramage

A Micronaut in the Wide World: The Imaginative Life and Times of Graham Percy Gregory O’Brien Auckland University Press, $59.99, ISBN 9781869404703 The exhibition staged in Wellington City Gallery to accompany the publication of this book contains a striking homage

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Posted in Art, Biography, Non-fiction, Review

Obituaries – Hugh Price, Bub Bridger and Louise St John White

Hugh Price 1929–2009 Being born with club feet was good luck, Hugh Price said – during remedial massage his mother read to him, getting him hooked on books. He came to champion access to literature as a fundamental human right.

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Poem – Gregory O’Brien

Low cloud, field of peonies, Martinborough Sleepless night in your house under the horizon—tiles of an unfinished roof sky of unfalling leaves—you hold tightly what you can: a farmer might lose a paddock, a house disappear down its staircase. This

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