Blog Archives

Blood memories, Natasha Templeton

Never Lost For Words: Stories and Memories  Amelia Batistich Auckland University Press, $29.95, ISBN 1869402464 Never Lost For Words is in part a memoir illustrated with snapshots from family albums, in part a collection of short stories triggered by events

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Posted in Autobiography, Literature, Non-fiction, Review, Short stories

Hard Knox, Robert Onopa

Black Oxen Elizabeth Knox Victoria University Press, $29.95, ISBN 0864734093 From the first paragraph of Elizabeth Knox’s previous novel, Vintner’s Luck, the reader enters as complete and rich an alternative world as exists in contemporary fiction. It is a world

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Posted in Fiction, Literature, Review

Interaction and empowerment, Lorna Dyall

Mauri Ora: the Dynamics of Maori Health Mason Durie Oxford University Press, $44.95, ISBN 019558418X Recently I attended an international conference in Auckland, focusing on gambling. This was an important conference, for it was planned to link with the review

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Posted in Health, Māori, Non-fiction, Review

Not simply red, Stephanie de Montalk

An Explanation of Poetry to my Father Glenn Colquhoun Steele Roberts, $14.95, ISBN 18877228443 Hats Jenny Powell-Chalmers HeadworX, $19.95, ISBN 0473071487 Chrome Paula Green Auckland University Press, $22.95, ISBN 1869402405 Last year my husband’s Uncle Alec, a retired Edinburgh bricklayer,

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Posted in Literature, Poetry, Review

No need to be noisy, Bill Sewell

Lucky Table Vincent O’Sullivan Victoria University Press, $24.95, ISBN 0864734069 Vincent O’Sullivan is not – and has never been – one of our noisier poets. He’s not known, like Denis Glover or James K Baxter, for extravagant behaviour; or, like

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Posted in Literature, Poetry, Review

Wine, wisdom and so on: Four founders look back at the beginnings of New Zealand Books

Retrospective   Shelagh Duckham Cox We met first in Lauris Edmond’s house at 22 Grass St in the middle of 1990 and the six of us – Lauris, John Mansfield Thomson, Pat Hawthorne, Vincent O’Sullivan, Martin Bond and Shelagh Duckham

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Posted in Opinion

Bent on purgation, Laurence Jenkins

Long Loop Home: A Memoir  Peter Wells Vintage, $27.95, ISBN 1869414683 The body language in the photograph forecasts much about the story between the covers of Peter Wells’s Long Loop Home. A Memoir. Three figures pose on a deserted beach,

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Posted in Memoir, Non-fiction, Review

How to lose friends … Linda Burgess

Reviewing It’s been a good day. I read the last 20 pages, the treat I’d saved myself for the morning, then I got out of bed and wrote the review. Four hundred words in less than half an hour. The

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Posted in Opinion

Making light of it, Kim Worthington

Light Readings Fiona Farrell Vintage, $24.95, ISBN 1869414578 It is perhaps a commonplace to note that at no point in history have we relied so heavily on the written word, or been such avid readers: of e-mail, junk mail, the

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Posted in Literature, Review, Short stories

Poem – W H Oliver

Blue Irises for Lauris Edmond   After, appropriately, several false turnings and twice overshooting the mark I was there, on the shorn grass looking around at the hills uncertain, suitably too, which of the freshly turned patches of dirt embraced

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Posted in Poem
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