snowing down south warm breath breathed out of our bodies into the overnight air and condensed to an ice crust on the glass with a sodden mitten tip push plates of glitter lace across the surface to make an…
Shebang: Collected Poems 1980-2000 David Howard Steele Roberts, $24.95, ISBN 1877228591 I associate volumes of Collected Poems with poetic fame – long sequence of small books, most now out of print, requiring a full collection to satisfy the demands of…
Dogside Story Patricia Grace Penguin, $34.95, ISBN 0141004193 In her long career as a writer of both novels and short fiction, Patricia Grace has shown remarkable consistency in her publishing pattern: invariably, the publication of a collection of short stories…
Recollecting Mansfield Margaret Scott Godwit, $29.95, ISBN 1869620763 It is hard to know whether Katherine Mansfield would have been delighted, amazed or appalled at the industry that has evolved since her death, at the academic careers she has sustained, at…
Coasting: The Sea Lion and the Lark Neville Peat Longacre Press, $29.95, ISBN 1877135577 Two centuries ago, sealers and whalers came to New Zealand to hunt marine mammals for their oil and skins. Millions were slaughtered, most of them on…
Black Oxen Elizabeth Knox Victoria University Press, $29.95, ISBN 0864734093 From the first paragraph of Elizabeth Knox’s previous novel, Vintner’s Luck, the reader enters as complete and rich an alternative world as exists in contemporary fiction. It is a world…