Blog Archives
James Brown interviews Bill Manhire James Brown (JB): Accessible but elusive. A lot of people seem to like your poetry, but find it difficult. How conscious are you, when you write, of an audience? In other words, do you ever…
A Dangerous Vine Barbara Ewing Penguin, $29.95, ISBN 0 316 64691 1 In expatriate innocence Barbara Ewing has done what Pakeha writers in this country have learnt they must not do. A novel about race relations, full of colourful Maori…
All Done With Mirrors Russell Haley Hazard Press, $24.95, ISBN 1 877161 68 3 This is the sort of novel you could search through – in vain – for a narrative skeleton: the firm coat-hanger from which the story is…
Doubtful Sounds: Essays and Interviews Bill Manhire Victoria University Press, $34.95, ISBN 0 86473 370 4 The Canadian poet Douglas Barbour once wrote that Bill Manhire’s poetry displays a “duplicitous unwillingness to guarantee anything”, a feature he felt to be…
I’m an unabashed Francophile when it comes to philosophy. I remember reading Sartre’s Words as a fifth-former, sitting in a Wellington coffee bar when coffee bars first became fashionable. Last year I attended a conference entitled The End of Postmodernism?…
Davina: An Acting Life Davina Whitehouse Reed, $34.95, ISBN 0 7900 0706 1 That much bandied-about word “Icon” is used rather too often in New Zealand to deify anyone who has stuck their head over the punga pallisade, who in…
Edith Collier: Her Life and Work 1885-1964 Joanne Drayton, Canterbury University Press, $29.95, ISBN 0 908812 90 6 Edith Collier left New Zealand in 1913 in order to study art in London. (Ironically, she arrived there just in time to…
Erebus: a poem Bill Sewell Hazard Press, $21.95, ISBN 1 877161 46 2 Is Erebus one of those events like Gallipoli, a bloodied trench, an oil stain in the white wastes of our forgetting? Like most people I remember where…
Eyewitness: A Memoir of Europe in the 1930s Geoffrey Cox University of Otago Press, $39.95, ISBN 1 877133 70 1 Sir Geoffrey Cox turns 91 this year, the last of that remarkable roll-call of New Zealanders whose only way out…
Kapiti Chris Maclean Whitcombe Press, $49.95, ISBN 0 473 06166 X A hilly chip off the old block, Kapiti Island lies alluringly close to the mainland – a Kapiti Coast landmark with a reputation considerably out of proportion to its…
“Aha – data reduction!” James Brown
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