Blog Archives

Nature’s nurture, Phillip Mann

Natural Healing in New Zealand Chris Cooper, Random House, $24.95   Whether it be the result of successive governments tinkering with the National Health system or the much heralded coming of the Age of Aquarius, the fact is that in

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Posted in Health, Non-fiction, Review

Variety, uniqueness and eccentricity, Bronwyn Labrum

Women in History 2 Barbara Brookes, Charlotte Macdonald, and Margaret Tennant (eds), Bridget Williams Books, $34.95   Mid-way through women’s suffrage centenary year, the distinctly double‑edged nature of the whole business is becoming increasingly apparent. On the one hand women

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Posted in Gender, History, Non-fiction, Review

Map of the Heart, Lee Wallace

Musica Ficta Anne Kennedy, Auckland University Press, $24.95   Now, to the scandal of men, women are prophesying. So runs the epigraph of Anne Kennedy’s Musica Ficta, though quite what scandal the novel involves remains a puzzle. In so far as it frames

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Posted in Fiction, Literature, Review

Poem — Bill Sewell

Interactive   Virtually alive stare through the terminal screen instead of the window. Clouds and light the water slopping about the harbour do not move with the speed or anything like the obedience of electronic impulses. A dance of fingers

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Posted in Poem

Travelling through fiction, Charles Ferrall

The Good Tourist and the Laughing Cadaver Michael Gifkins (ed) Vintage, 1993, $24.95   Visiting a library in Timbuktu, an actual town in the central west African country of Mali, the Australian writer Murray Bail is told by an Islamic

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Posted in Fiction, Literature, Review

Bombasts and Jinglists, Mark Williams

The New Place; The Poetry of Settlement in New Zealand, 1852-1914 Harvey McQueen, Victoria University Press, $29.95   New Zealand poetry begins with Ursula Bethell. Before her there were scribblers, versifiers, poetasters, bombasts, jinglists and hobbyists, but there were no

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Posted in Literature, Poetry

Writing and revenge, Colleen Reilly

A Distraction of Opposites Sandra Arnold, Hazard Press, Christchurch, $24.95   The front cover illustration of A Distraction of Opposites is a painting by Heather Busch entitled ‘Look at the Pattern.’ At first glance, what you see is ordinary objects on top

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Posted in Fiction, Literature, Review

Poetic Grammars, Mary Paul

How to Talk Andrew Johnston, Victoria University Press, $19.95 Piki Ake! Robert Sullivan, Auckland University Press, $19.95   I was given these two books to review with the instruction that I should look at them in the wider context of

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Posted in Literature, Poetry, Review

Gee Whizz, Elizabeth Smither

Going West Maurice Gee, Viking, 1992, $39.95 Rem tene, verba sequentur – I have it, like an archivist, on a filched catalogue card. For the novel: ‘Grasp the subject and the words will follow’. For the poem, the reverse: Verba tene, res

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Posted in Fiction, Literature, Review

The Persistence of Talent: the Poetry of Brian Turner, Vincent O’Sullivan

Even five years ago, it would have seemed impossible that Brian Turner should win the country’s premier award for poetry. Not that anyone said anything much against his verse. But there was the quiet assumption that he worked his own slightly idiosyncratic

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Posted in Literature, Poetry, Review
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