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Infectious enjoyment, Fleur Adcock

Night Burns with a White Fire: The Essential Lauris Edmond
Frances Edmond and Sue Fitchett (eds)
Steele Roberts, $35.00,
ISBN 9780947493448

This enjoyable anthology doesn’t pretend to be anything but an act of loving homage; as the editors admit, they did not plan a scholarly book. It consists of poems and a smaller number of extracts from Lauris Edmond’s prose writings, edited by the two people whose names are on the title page, but largely chosen by Lauris’s friends, admirers, and members of her family, who were asked to submit suggestions. The arrangement is thematic, progressing through childbirth, family love, friendship, Wellington, travel and other topics, and ending with a powerfully affecting section about death. It includes a timeline, a bibliography, and an index of contributors; one of the incidental pleasures of reading the collection is to cross-check titles of individual pieces with this index to see who chose what.

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Poems in the classroom, Jo Kahl

Essential New Zealand Poems ed Lauris Edmond and Bill Sewell Godwit, $29.95, ISBN 1869620879 Why is it that fictional teachers are always teachers of English? How many times do you see on television or at the movies teachers attempting to

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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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More than a decent splash, Diana Bridge

Carnival of New Zealand Creatures Lauris Edmond Pemmican Press, $14.95, ISBN 0473073188 I’ll Tell You This Much Vincent O’Sullivan Pemmican Press, $14.95, ISBN 047306345X Avalanche  Vivienne Plumb Pemmican Press, $14.95, ISBN 0473067056 Plunge Harry Ricketts Pemmican Press, $14.95, ISBN 0473076306

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The Truth Problem, Anne French

An Autobiography Lauris Edmond Bridget Williams Books, $49.95, ISBN 18772421225 Lauris Edmond: Selected Poems 1975-2000 ed K O Arvidson Bridget Williams Books, $39.95, ISBN 1877242152 There’s only one issue to be resolved with autobiography, and that is the Truth Problem.

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Posted in Autobiography, Literature, Non-fiction, Poetry, Review

Poems – Lauris Edmond

from Carnival of New Zealand Creatures tuatara The old survivor, tuatara, reptilian great-grandfather, observing with heavy-lidded eye the still old centuries passing by; slow little bloke in enamel coat shedding his tail, croaking his croak, his third eye watching world

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Obituary – Lauris Edmond

Lauris Edmond (1924 – 2000) Lauris Edmond died at home without warning on Friday 28 January 2000. We lost a major poet, an accomplished woman of letters, and a marvellous personality. The shock that united mourners in Old St Paul’s

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Poems for the pocket, Vivienne Plumb

50 Poems: A Celebration Lauris Edmond Bridget Williams Books/Peppercorn Press, $29.95, ISBN 1 877 242 039 It is good to mark our lives with some celebration, which 
 is why we should welcome this celebratory collection of Lauris Edmond’s work

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Editorial – Issue 40

Beyond the silencing process Lauris Edmond It’s said that as you grow older you become more au fait with the past than the present. Along with many other myths of aging, this one does not fit my experience – or

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Generous to a fault, Jane Stafford

New Zealand Love Poems ed Lauris Edmond Oxford University Press, $45.00, ISBN 0195583981 Posthumous volumes invite a certain kind of reading, a feeling that, as this is the last time we will speak to the author, they are addressing us

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