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Rhythm and voice, R Carl Shuker interviews Damien Wilkins

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

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Posted in Comment

Love and other cheeses, Susan Budd

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

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Posted in Fiction, Literature, Review

Paradise preserved? Simon Upton

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

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Posted in Non-fiction, Review, Sociology

Art of survival, Ross Calman

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

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Posted in Art, History, Māori, Non-fiction, Review

Make-believe, John McCrystal

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

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Posted in Fiction, Literature, Review

Poem – Vincent O’Sullivan

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

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Posted in Poem

Fruit ‘n nut, Emma Neale

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

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Posted in Literature, Poetry, Review

Poem – Robert Sullivan

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

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Posted in Poem

Eluding closure, Louise O’Brien

Listening to the Everly Brothers and Other Stories Elizabeth Smither Penguin, $27.95, ISBN 0143018205 I’ve never been a big fan of the short story. I’ve always found it to be, at once, far too short and far too long. Mired

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Posted in Fiction, Literature, Review, Short stories

From ‘Somebodies and Nobodies’, Brian Turner

From Somebodies and Nobodies: Growing up in an extraordinary sporting family Vintage, $34.95, ISBN 1869415078 Soon after I arrived in Christchurch, so did the Beatles – pure coincidence. I donned my dark grey dufflecoat and lurked on the fringe of

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