Blog Archives

Fruit bats to faith, Stella Ramage

Dark Night: Walking with McCahon Martin Edmond Auckland University Press, $37.99, ISBN 9781869404833   A meander through Sydney in the possible footsteps of artist Colin McCahon, who once spent 28 amnesiac hours lost in the unfamiliar city, seems a flimsy…
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Posted in Memoir, Non-fiction, Review

Time-capsule poems, Sarah Jane Barnett

Steal Away Boy: Selected Poems of David Mitchell Martin Edmond and Nigel Roberts (eds) Auckland University Press, $34.99, ISBN 9781869404598   In the 1970s David Mitchell was the poet everyone wanted to be. A self-possessed and talented hipster, Mitchell’s best-selling…
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Posted in Literature, Poetry, Review

In plain sight, Martin Edmond

Report on Experience: John Mulgan Peter Whiteford (ed) Victoria University Press, $40.00, ISBN 9780864736192   In Keats’s last letter, sent from Rome to his friend Charles Brown in England three months before he died, he writes of his “habitual feeling…
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Posted in Memoir, Non-fiction, Review

Letters – Issue 90

What’s in a name? John O’Leary in his review of Dominic Alessio’s edition of The Great Romance by “The Inhabitant” (NZB Autumn 2010) comments “we do not know who wrote it”. But the National Library’s wonderful searchable site of New…
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Posted in Letters

One whole thing, Martin Edmond

Towards a Promised Land: On the Life and Art of Colin McCahon Gordon Brown Auckland University Press, $79.99, ISBN 9781869404529 As I began to read the 16 essays, plus introduction, that make up Gordon Brown’s Towards a Promised Land, I…
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Posted in Art, Essays, Non-fiction, Review

Happenstance, Martin Edmond

Chance is a Fine Thing  Philip Temple Vintage, $36.99, ISBN 9781869419851 In his preface to Chance is a Fine Thing, Philip Temple – writer, mountaineer, campaigner, explorer and historian – essays a distinction between memoir and autobiography. The latter, he…
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Posted in Memoir, Non-fiction, Review

To hell and gone, down there, Jane Westaway

Zone of the Marvellous: In Search of the Antipodes Martin Edmond Auckland University Press, $34.99, ISBN 9781869404475 Anna Kavan’s New Zealand: A Pacific Interlude in a Turbulent Life Jennifer Sturm (ed) Vintage, $36.99, ISBN 9781869791339 Passageways: The Story of a…
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Posted in History, Non-fiction, Review

Walking with McCahon, Martin Edmond

In this extract from Dark Night, Martin Edmond retraces the steps of Colin McCahon, who, on April 11 1984, went missing in Sydney’s Royal Botanical Gardens and was not found again for 36 hours. I actually made the walk from…
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Posted in Extract

Zero waste, Martin Edmond

Into the Wider World: A Back Country Miscellany Brian Turner Godwit, $44.99, ISBN 9781869621421 Near the beginning of the seventh of the 34 essays in this book, the 16-year-old Brian Turner, full of teenage angst and contemplating suicide, is sitting…
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Posted in Essays, Literature, Poetry, Review

The universe and everything, Philip Temple

Waimarino County and Other Excursions Martin Edmond Auckland University Press, $35.00,  ISBN 9781869403911 Phone Home Berlin – Collected Non-fiction Nigel Cox Victoria University Press, $35.00,  ISBN 9780864735676   The revival of the essay in book form continues compensating, to our applause,…
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Posted in Essays, Non-fiction, Review
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