Blog Archives
Poem – Peter Bland
We call it winter We call it winter, this Northland chill with its one-bar heater, its woollen cap, its hint of frost on the roof. But you have to laugh when you think of Eskimos crowding round a whale-oil…
Poem – Harry Ricketts
At the Frankfurt Book Fair: a triolet We do our best to do our stuff, our quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle. A Lion in the Meadow meets Alan Duff: We do our best to do our stuff. The things…
Only the lonely, Timothy G Jones
The Lonely and the Alone: The Poetics of Isolation in New Zealand Fiction Doreen D’Cruz and John C Ross Rodopi, €85.00, ISBN 9789042034747 Loneliness holds a special place in New Zealand literature. If there is a single image that casts…
Tagged with: Doreen D’Cruz, Issue 100, John C Ross, Rodopi, Summer 2012, Timothy G Jones
Posted in Literature, Non-fiction, Review
Posted in Literature, Non-fiction, Review
Gentleman’s agreement, Tony Simpson
Other People’s Wars: New Zealand in Afghanistan, Iraq and the War on Terror Nicky Hager Craig Potton Publishing, $45.00, ISBN 9781877517693 About a year ago, shortly after this book was published, I heard Nicky Hager in an interview deploring the…
Tagged with: Craig Potton Publishing, Issue 100, Nicky Hager, Summer 2012, Tony Simpson
Posted in Non-fiction, War
Posted in Non-fiction, War
No need for bookshelves, Guy Somerset
New Zealand Listener books and culture editor Guy Somerset tries to be brave about e-books. It’s the bookmarks I’ll miss most. At least that’s what I used to think when I was a fervent advocate of the demise of the…
Medical check-up, Rae Varcoe
The Good Doctor: What Patients Want Ron Paterson Auckland University Press, $40.00, ISBN 9781869405922 Neither title nor subtitle accurately reflects the thrust of this book. It is less about how we might distinguish the good doctor (and define what we…
Tagged with: Auckland University Press, Issue 100, Rae Varcoe, Ron Paterson, Summer 2012
Posted in Health, Non-fiction, Review
Posted in Health, Non-fiction, Review
Letters – Issue 100
It’s a polemic Your reviewer Louise O’Brien (NZB, Spring 2012) criticises me for not offering solutions “to the many problems which [The Passionless People Revisited] lays out so emphatically”. Oh dear. It is a polemic, a legitimate form of disputation…
Poem – Tim Upperton
Sonnet Fuck your simile. Fuck your elegy for. Fuck your homily, your extended metaphor. Fuck your metonymy. Fuck your exquisite language economy. Fuck your metre, your keeping time. Fuck your vers libre. Fuck your rhyme. Fuck your Elizabethan men…
Home truths and fantasy worlds, Kathryn Walls
Kathryn Walls identifies the realism beneath Mahy’s magic. Margaret Mahy has been repeatedly described as “magical” or “marvellous”, her fiction as “fantastic.” These conveniently alliterating adjectives seem apt partly because so much of Mahy’s work is classifiable as fantasy, and…
Obsolescence is just the beginning, Peter Simpson
Posted in Comment