Many New Zealand writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century travelled extensively or lived overseas for a time, and they often led very interesting lives. The received wisdom is that they were forced to leave these colonial backblocks in search of literary inspiration and publishing opportunities. In The Expatriate Myth, Helen Bones presents a challenge to this conventional understanding, based on detailed historical and empirical research. Was it actually necessary for them to leave to find success? How prevalent was expatriatism among New Zealand writers? Did their experiences fit the usual tropes about expatriatism and exile? Were they fleeing an oppressive society lacking in literary opportunity? In the field of literary studies, scholars are often consumed with questions about ‘national’ literature and ‘what it means to be a New Zealander’. And yet many of New Zealand’s writers living overseas operated in a transnational way, taking advantage of colonial networks in a way that belies any notion of a single national allegiance. Most who left New Zealand, even if they were away for a time, continued to write about and interact with their homeland, and in many cases came back. In this fascinating and clear-sighted book, Helen Bones offers a fresh perspective on some hoary New Zealand literary chestnuts.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 242

Dimensions: 150 x 230 mm

Publication Date: 20-02-2018

Featured Artists: Chris Corson-Scott, Heather Straka, Jenna Packer, Samuel Harrison Writers: Aimee-Jane Anderson-O’Connor, Nick Ascroft, Claire Baylis, Miro Bilbrough, Victoria Broome, Iain Britton, Owen Bullock, Christine Burrows, Brent Cantwell, Marisa Cappetta, Joanna Cho, Stephanie Christie, Makyla Curtis, Doc Drumheller, Mark Edgecombe, Lynley Edmeades, Johanna Emeney, Riemke Ensing, Ciaran Fox, Michael Gould, Shen Haobo, Paula Harris, René Harrison, Stephen Higginson, Jeffrey Paparoa Holman, Amanda Hunt, Anna Jackson, Ted Jenner, Anne Kennedy, Erik Kennedy, Jessica Le Bas, Wes Lee, Michele Leggott, Carolyn McCurdie, Robert McLean, Fardowsa Mohamed, Kavita Ivy Nandan, Emma Neale, Piet Nieuwland, Claire Orchard, Bob Orr, Jenny Powell, Chris Price, Helen Rickerby, Ron Riddell, L.E. Scott, Jo-Ella Sarich, Iain Sharp, Charlotte Simmonds, Peter Simpson, Tracey Slaughter, Laura Solomon, Barry Southam, Matafanua Tamatoa, Philip Temple, Dunstan Ward, Elizabeth Welsh, Sue Wootton, Mark Young, Karen Zelas.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 208

Dimensions: 165 x 215 mm

Publication Date: 01-05-2017

Featured Artists: Elizabeth Thomson, Nick Austin, James Robinson, Simon Kaan Writers: Michalia Arathimos, Ruth Arnison, Nick Ascroft, Airini Beautrais, Tony Beyer, Peter Bland, Victoria Broome, Sam Clements, Jennifer Compton, David Coventry, Carolyn Cossey, Ben Egerton, Riemke Ensing, Scott Hamilton, Lynn Jenner, Jan Kemp, Brent Kininmont, Jessica LeBas, Therese Lloyd, Olivia Macassey, Ria Masae, Kirsten McDougall, Leslie McKay, Caoimhe McKeogh, Robynanne Milford, Alice Miller, Michael Morrissey, Elizabeth Morton, Heidi North-Bailey, Claire Orchard, Maris O’Rourke, Jenny Powell, M.D. Rann, Rebecca Reader, Nicholas Reid, Elspeth Sandys, Kerrin P. Sharpe, Elizabeth Smither, Michael Steven, John Summers, Leilani Tamu, Chris Tse, Sue Wootton, Karen Zelas Reviews: Lawrence Jones on Bloomsbury South: The arts in Christchurch 1933–1953 by Peter Simpson; Vaughan Rapatahana on Coming Rain by Stephen Daisley; Michael Morrissey on The Antipodeans by Greg McGee; Christopher Ward-Greene on Love as a Stranger by Owen Marshall; James Norcliffe on Beside Herself by Chris Price and Fits and Starts by Andrew Johnston; Sally Blundell on A History of New Zealand Women by Barbara Brookes; Edmund Bohan on Outcasts of the Gods by Hazel Petrie and Ka Ngaro Te Reo by Paul Moon; David Herkt on Lost and Gone Away by Lynn Jenner

Bind: paperback

Pages: 208

Dimensions: 165 x 215 mm

Publication Date: 21-11-2016

This third and final volume of Charles Brasch’s compelling private journals covers the years from when he was 48 to his death at 64. By the 1960s, Brasch, though very private by temperament, was a reluctant public figure, especially as editor of Landfall – indisputably the country’s leading cultural quarterly (he eventually quit as editor after 20 years). He was also becoming a highly regarded poet, with eventually six books (one posthumous) to his name. Behind the scenes Brasch was increasingly important as an art collector and as patron and benefactor; the Burns, Hodgkins and Mozart Fellowships – for writers, artists and composers respectively – which he helped anonymously to found and fund, all began in this period. Among his friends Brasch counted most of the country’s leading artists, writers and intellectuals including Sargeson, McCahon, McCormick, Stead, the Pauls, the Woollastons, the Baxters, Lilburn, Beaglehole, Angus, Oliver, Bensemann, Lusk, Frame and Dallas. These near contemporaries were joined by the talented young, many met as contributors to Landfall – including Gee, Cross, Shadbolt, Duggan, O’Sullivan, Hotere, Tuwhare, Caselberg, Middleton and Manhire. Brasch’s lively and sometimes acerbic accounts of such people are a fascinating aspect of his journals. Behind the esteemed poet, editor and public intellectual, however, was a sensitive and often angst-ridden man, who confided to his journals (and poems) the emotional roller-coaster of his private life, especially his endlessly frustrated search for love. Presented here are deep attachments to both men and women, including Andrew Packard (a visiting English zoologist) and Margaret Scott, widow of Harry Scott with whom Brasch had also been in love. Late in life his strong involvement with an elderly Jewish émigrée, Moli Zimmerman, adds another surprising layer to the complex and lovable man his journals reveal. Brasch’s journals will change forever the perception and understanding of an outstanding New Zealander and of the era to which he contributed so much.

Bind: hardback

Pages: 694

Dimensions: 170 x 245 mm

Publication Date: 20-04-2018

Koe invites readers to explore human connections with nature through a selection of over 100 poems composed in Aotearoa New Zealand from pre-European times to the present day. Including a substantial introduction and editors’ notes, Koe is the first anthology to provide a comprehensive overview of ecopoetic traditions in Aotearoa and to locate these traditions as part of the global ecopoetry scene. In Koe, editors Janet Newman and Robert Sullivan reveal the genesis, development and heritage of a unique Aotearoa New Zealand ecopoetry derived from both traditional Māori poetry and the English poetry canon. Organised chronologically into three sections—representing the early years (poets born in or before the nineteenth century), the middle years of the twentieth century, and the twenty-first-century ‘now’—each segment presents a diverse array of voices. Across all these time frames, speaking from the conditions of their era, the poets delve into themes of humility, reverence and interconnectedness with the nonhuman world. They challenge traditional Eurocentric perspectives, highlight the significance of indigenous narratives, and wrestle with the impacts of European colonisation. With more than 100 poems of celebration, elegy, apprehension, hope and activism, Koe gives us the history that holds our future.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 315

Dimensions: 170 x 220 mm

Publication Date: 22-08-2024

Deep Colour, by acclaimed poet Diana Bridge, is a fiercely sensory and meticulously crafted collection. These poems respond with graceful precision to the immediate physical world, and meditate on time, beauty and the nature of being. Whether remembering a friend, describing a child’s first steps, or observing her surroundings – a tree, a painting, the flashing fin of a goldfish, a simple everyday object like a lamp or a bowl – Bridge is finely attuned to the here-and-now. ‘While it lived,’ she writes, ‘it was intensity itself.’ These prismatic poems, which include some exquisite translations of poems by the fifth-century Chinese poet Xie Tiao, are fully immersed in the world, vividly alive to the dance of light and shadow, movement and stillness, sound and silence. Few poets see so clearly or write so luminously. Bridge’s poems return us to the daily round with our senses heightened, our minds alert and our hearts made tender.

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Pages: 84

Dimensions: 150 x 230 mm

Publication Date: 20-04-2023

This volume of Charles Brasch’s journals covers the years from late 1945 to the end of 1957, when the poet and editor was aged 36 to 48. It begins with his return to New Zealand after World War II to establish a literary quarterly to be published by the Caxton Press. The journals cover the first decade or so of his distinguished editorship of Landfall, a role that brought Brasch into contact with New Zealand’s leading artists and intelligentsia. His frank and often detailed descriptions of these people – including Frank Sargeson, A.R.D. Fairburn, Keith Sinclair, Eric McCormick, James Bertram, J.C. Beaglehole, Maria Dronke, Fred and Evelyn Page, Alistair Campbell, Bill Oliver, Toss and Edith Woollaston, Denis Glover, Allen Curnow, Leo Bensemann, Lawrence Baigent, Ngaio Marsh, Colin McCahon, James K. Baxter, Janet Frame, Ruth Dallas and many others – are among the highlights of the book. Unmarried and longing for intimacy, Brasch also writes with great candour about his relationships with Rose Archdall, Rodney Kennedy and Harry Scott, revealing a side of himself that has not been known about before. Central to Brasch’s life was the vocation of poetry. He writes movingly about his own work, and also about his love of nature and the outdoors, including lively descriptions of walking the Milford and Routeburn tracks. The book ends with his visit to Europe in 1957, which confirmed his sense that New Zealand had become for him ‘a centre & a world’. A lengthy introduction by Peter Simpson and other editorial apparatus guide the reader through this engrossing material.

Bind: hardback

Pages: 660

Dimensions: 170 x 245 mm

Publication Date: 01-05-2017

Walking to Jutland Street is the impressive first book-length collection by up-and-coming Auckland-based poet Michael Steven. The title refers to Dunedin’s industrial wharf precinct where some of the poet’s friends shared a flat in 2010. A poem about friendship in the face of the other, ‘Walking to Jutland Street’ vividly recreates their evening ‘constitutional’ from the flat via the bridge over train tracks to the city and back, with its inebriated, surreal, sometimes nightmarish inhabitants. Other poems deliver snapshots of the human condition through bizarre personalities such as the subject of ‘Dropped Pin: Jollie Street’, ‘a man who proclaimed to function / best in a state close to coma’. Still others are tender love poems, travel poems (in 2016 the poet slept in the last bedroom of explorer Vasco da Gama), poems about family or childhood memory. A poet of gritty, day-to-day urban New Zealand reality (whether depicting teenage drug dealing, alcoholics or the night shelter), Steven is equally a writer steeped in literary tradition, Buddhist mysticism and world-historical narrative. His is a voice that aspires to capture quotidian experience or personality as a phenomenon implicitly of all times and places. In this pursuit, his literary cousins are Olds, Orr, Mitchell, Dickson, Johnson and Baxter.

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Pages: 80

Dimensions: 150 x 230 mm

Publication Date: 20-03-2018

Beautifully written and illustrated, Katherine Mansfield’s Europe is part travelogue, part literary biography, part detective story and part ghost story. Guided by Mansfield’s journals and letters, author Redmer Yska pursues the traces of her restless journeying in Europe, seeking out the places where she lived, worked and – a century ago this year – died. Along the way, he meets a cast of present-day Mansfield devotees who help shape his understanding of the impressions Mansfield left on their territories and how she is formally (and informally) commemorated in Europe. In Katherine Mansfield’s Europe, Yska takes us to the villas, pensions, hotels, spas, railway stations, churches, towns, beaches and cities where Mansfield wrote some of her finest stories. Hauntingly, these are also places where she suffered from piercing loneliness and homesickness, rooms in which she endured illness and extreme physical hardship, windows from which she gazed as she grappled with her mortality. With maps and stunning photography, this engaging and well-researched book richly illuminates Katherine Mansfield’s time in Europe and reveals her enduring presence in the places she frequented. Whether familiar or unfamiliar with Katherine Mansfield’s work and life, readers will find Yska’s account of her travels and travails in Europe freshly informative and deeply moving.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 272

Dimensions: 170 x 230 mm

Publication Date: 02-05-2023

A mysterious doppelgänger sister, a newborn baby, a boy in a mural, a detective, a former lover, a student stalker … are they real or imagined? Building on Diane Brown’s tradition of extended poetic narratives, Every Now and Then I Have Another Child is an inventive and heartfelt meditation on motherhood, the creative impulse and the blurred line between imagination and reality. This delightful, evocative poetic narrative wafts between the truly surreal and the ‘everyday’ absurd.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 164

Dimensions: 150 x 230 mm