Blog Archives
From Muldoon to Lange: New Zealand Elections in the 1980s Stephen Levine and Alan McRobie MC Enterprises, $39.95, ISBN 0959771530 For almost thirty years from 1960, Professor Robert Chapman systematically studied New Zealand’s election campaigns and their outcomes. Since 1990,…
Volume 12 | Number 5 | Issue 56 | December 2002 Tony Simpson: Damien Wilkins, When Famous People Come to Town; Kate Camp, On Kissing; Vincent O’Sullivan, On Longing Editorial Letters Harry Ricketts: Angus Gillies, Adam Parore: The Wicked…
R Carl Shuker interviews Damien Wilkins R Carl Shuker (RCS): Do you remember the initial spark of Chemistry? Damien Wilkins (DW): Yes, I do. I was down in Timaru, where the novel is set. I was hanging out at…
Blessed Are Sarah-Kate Lynch Black Swan, $26.95, ISBN 1869414977 Aromantic comedy with the WOW factor, Blessed Are makes you laugh, makes you cry and tells you everything you ever wanted to know, and more, about cheese-making. Coolarney House, where Joseph…
Pavlova Paradise Revisited Austin Mitchell Penguin, $27.95, ISBN 0143018264 For those old enough to remember it, The Half-Gallon Quarter-Acre Pavlova Paradise was a funny, disrespectful but good-natured account of what it felt like to be a clever, progressive Left Brit…
Carved Histories: Rotorua Ngati Tarawhai Woodcarving Roger Neich Auckland University Press, $89.95, ISBN 186940257X It would not be a gross overstatement to say that we have got Ngati Tarawhai, a tribe originally from Lake Okataina (east of Rotorua), to thank…
Paradise Tina Shaw Penguin, $27.95, ISBN 0143018272 Notions of paradise – nirvana, Shangri-la – are universal to human societies, because they are, of course, simply expressions of that most basic of human faculties, hope. Just as we live our lives…
The Retired Bruiser dreaming La Belle Dame at the least Whenever he saw “I could be happy here” appear across a bedroom wall like words blazoned on a banner by a man in glinting metal, on a horse too…
Only One Angel Jan Kemp University of Otago Press, $24.95, ISBN 1877276170 Snowing Down South Janet Charman Auckland University Press, $21.95, ISBN 1869402685 After publishing a poem in a church magazine, and receiving messages from people all over the country…
South Point, Hawai‘i On the Big Island, where the ocean voyaging waka left for Tahiti, perhaps Aotearoa, we watched the mooring stones: smoothed by water, smoothed by hands, carved out to moor the waka. We felt the spirits soar…
Rhythm and voice, R Carl Shuker interviews Damien Wilkins
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