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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Capes of China Slide Away James Bertram, Auckland University Press, $39.95 James Bertram spent ten years of his long life in Asia. Those years prompt the use of Auden’s quotation as the title of his book and occupy over…
Auto/Biographies Kendrick Smithyman, Auckland University Press, $19.95 This is Kendrick Smithyman’s twelfth book of poetry. It continues and restates the themes of his recent collections, Stories About Wooden Keyboards and Are you Going to the Pictures? to the point of recycling ideas and…