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Issue 14 | August 1994

Volume 4 | Number 2 | Issue 14 | August 1994 Letters Nicholas Reid: Lloyd Geering, Tomorrow’s God Feature essays: J K Baxter retrospective Fleur Adcock: ‘Wielding the jawbone of an ass’ Tom Beard: ‘More than the myth he became’…
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An inflated importance, John McBeth

Live from the Battlefield Peter Arnett Hodder & Stoughton, $49.95 Back in the 1960s and 1970s, Australia and Fleet Street were the beacons for every New Zealand journalist without a house full of kids or one of those painfully faithful…
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Posted in Media, Non-fiction, Review, War

An important work, Peter Tremewan

Te Wai Pounamu, The Greenstone lsland: A History of the Southern Maori during the European Colonisation of New Zealand Harry C Evison Aoraki Press (in association with Ngai Tahu Maori Trust Board and Te Runanganui o Tahu), $58.95 A reading…
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Posted in History, Māori, Non-fiction, Review

Puzzling over the best way to tell it, Kendrick Smithyman

The Singing Whakapapa C K Stead Penguin Books, $24.95 In February last year C K Stead spoke to the twenty-seventh Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association congress. He called his address “Narrativity, or the Birth of the Story” and published…
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Posted in Fiction, Literature, Review

Letters – Issue 14

Making Haiku Charles Croot’s view that only a poem with 17 syllables in 5‑7‑5 form can qualify as a haiku led him to discount almost the entire content of the New Zealand Haiku Anthology in New Zealand Books Vol 4…
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Posted in Letters

Tomorrow’s symbol, Nicholas Reid

Tomorrow’s God Lloyd Geering Bridget Williams Books, $34.95 Reading Lloyd Geering’s Tomorrow’s God, an anecdote about the late Orson Welles kept surfacing in my mind. Welles was doing the standard talk‑show interview when he decided to hold forth on religion.…
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Posted in Non-fiction, Religion, Review

Wielding the jawbone of an ass, Fleur Adcock

I last saw Jim Baxter towards the end of 1962, eating steak and chips for lunch in a restaurant on Lambton Quay. I was about to leave for England, but not so imminently that I felt the need to make…
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Posted in Opinion

More than the myth he became, Tom Beard

I was four when Baxter died and living on the other side of the world. It seems that everyone here has a Baxter anecdote ‑ something along the lines of “I remember finding Jim passed out next to my letterbox”…
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The virtue of defeat, Bill Oliver

I am not sure why I or anyone else should bother about the politics of a poet, especially of a poet whose typical response to politics varied only between contempt and rage. Still, he wrote a considerable number of political…
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Posted in Opinion

Trapped in the looking‑glass, Tessa Barringer

Janet Frame: Subversive Fictions Gina Mercer University of Otago Press, $29.95 In her discussion of Janet Frame’s tenth novel, Living in the Maniototo, Australian critic Gina Mercer suggests that “Frame sets up a fun parlour in which mirrors distort the…
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Posted in Literature, Review
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