Dan Davin: A Field Officer’s Notebook: Selected Poems
Robert McLean (ed)
Cold Hub Press, $30.00,
ISBN 9780473430689
Robert McLean here presents an edited selection of Dan Davin’s poetry, collecting a body of verse seen as having value in itself rather than attempting a scholarly edition or detailed exegesis. A brief contextualising introduction emphasises the influence of WWII on Davin.
Grahame Sydney, artist, recalls a significant book.
It lay beside my bed through most of my teenaged years, one of two constant companions of my privately turbulent adolescence. The other was Robert Henri’s The Art Spirit, and both paperbacks grew imperceptibly more battered with miles and years, finally so fragile in their sellotaped bandaging that pages worked free of their spinal gum. They were the only two books I took with me on my melancholy odyssey to England, dreaming of artistic stardom in early 1973, and I have them both still.
View from the South
Owen Marshall (Grahame Sydney photographer)
Vintage, $40.00, ISBN 9780143771845
It often seems to be the case that novelists, when they turn to verse, move with a more relaxed gait, a less self-conscious regard, than those whose passport to the Republic of Letters declares them to be Poets. I am glad that Owen Marshall is not a Poet. This happy circumstance leaves him free to write poetry. There is no straining for originality in his verse, no exhibitionist sensitivity, just a quiet confidence in the value of well-wrought thought.
Lyla
Fleur Beale
Allen and Unwin, $19.00,
ISBN 9781760113780
Lyla is a book written in raw truth. The story begins in a world of homework and the normal everyday life of a young schoolgirl named Lyla. She attends Avonside Girls’ High School and lives happily in the city of Christchurch. But then disaster strikes: an earthquake shakes the lives of every Christchurch citizen, turning us upside down into chaos. This book reveals the truth of the February Christchurch earthquake, the loss people faced, and the terrible things we saw. It brings a reader out of their world of media and newspapers and reveals the personal terrors one faced in that horrific time.
Rainfall
Ella West
Allen and Unwin, $19.00, ISBN 9781760296834
Showtym Adventures: Casper, the Spirited Arabian
Kelly Wilson
Puffin, $15.00, ISBN 9780143772248
Do You Want to Gallop with Me?
Sophie Siers (Judith Trevelyan illus)
Millwood Press, $20.00, ISBN 9780473408541
The Gift Horse
Sophie Siers (Katharine White illus)
Millwood Press, $20.00, ISBN 9780473408558
Since I learned to read, I’ve read about horses and riders. Did I love horses because of the books I read, or did I read the books because their covers were stable doors? What does it mean to read about a female child desiring and caring for a horse? Answering these questions has felt like psychoanalysis; a girl galloping a horse should be a Jungian archetype – and I have been that girl.
He’s so MASC
Chris Tse
Auckland University Press, $30.00,
ISBN 1781869408879
The Facts
Therese Lloyd
Victoria University Press, $25.00,
ISBN 9781776561810
Dark Days at the Oxygen Café
James Norcliffe
Victoria University Press, $25.00,
ISBN 9781776560837
The Expatriate Myth: New Zealand Writers and the Colonial World
Helen Bones
Otago University Press, $35.00,
ISBN 9781988531175
The Expatriates
Martin Edmond
Bridget Williams Books, $50.00,
ISBN 9781988533179
Helen Bones aims to dismantle the “myth” that New Zealand writers, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, had to leave New Zealand to pursue careers as writers. She argues that this myth is wrong in at least two directions: first, that many New Zealand writers stayed and wrote and published, in New Zealand – that New Zealand was at this time not the cultural wasteland that it was made out to be by the generation of scholars she calls the “cultural nationalists”; and, second, that writers who did leave had neither an easier nor a harder time of it than those who stayed. Her book is a quantitative study, insofar as it can be: not interested in the “content” of books, but in “comprehensive data collection”, “literary empirical techniques”, and “a dataset of publications”. Her goal is to “quantify the significance of literary expatriatism”.
Catch Me When You Fall
Eileen Merriman
Penguin, $20.00,
ISBN 9780143770930
Ash Arising
Mandy Hager
Penguin, $20.00,
ISBN 9780143772439
Eileen Merriman’s Catch Me When You Fall – a title that provokes a head-tilt to begin with and that takes multiple possible meanings upon reading the book – is narrated by 17-year-old Alex Byrd, and it tells the story of a particular autumn (or fall, as they would say in America) in her life.
Responsible writing
Writer Fleur Beale considers what’s difficult and desirable in books for YA readers.
The answer to the question of what responsibility writers may or may not have to their teenage readers in essence for me is to write a damn good, emotionally true story. Part of the difficulty of pinning it more precisely lies in the fact that a teenage audience includes such a wide spectrum of maturity and experience that a book resonating with one reader might be something a different reader would not even consider looking at.
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