what did you eat willful Chang’e? – fly to the moon where no one hears you rabbiting on you won’t silence me by chopping the tree its white leaves and a night-dipped pen the fuel of my longevity As one of eight writers, poet Janet Charman was invited in 2009 to take part in a hectic, immersive literary residency in Hong Kong. Written out of this time of stimulating buzz, 仁 surrender chronicles the tensions, translations and literary crushes that ensue, with ever-present comedy. From this intense hothouse and these privileged constraints flow narrative poems that capture the creative and cultural dislocation of travel, with its petty irritants and constant surprises. Charman’s verse has always been distinguished by a combination of astute observation, compassion, pluck, vulnerability and willingness to poke fun at herself. – Iain Sharp In her laconic and original style, Janet Charman writes a body of work which sees [her] exploiting the motif of journeying to investigate the colonised land, past and present. – Siobhan Harvey

Bind: paperback

Pages: 118

Dimensions: 150 x 230 mm

Publication Date: 01-11-2017

Published simultaneously in Ireland by Salmon Poetry, Majella Cullinane’s remarkable second collection, Whisper of a Crow’s Wing, is the work of a poet with a distinct and powerful voice. These poems weigh and examine oppositions – the distance of time and place, the balance of life and death, the poet’s New Zealand home and her Irish heritage. Cullinane conjures the ghosts that haunt places and objects; our inner and outer world, with rich, physical language: ‘barter the night for the whorl of a wave’s tongue, the relish of brine. Know what it is to untangle light from the tooth of a roving tide.’ (Invitation) She writes with lyrical intensity about motherhood and family life, including the experience of miscarriage, and the process of moving through grief and loss to a place of acceptance and healing. This is a profound collection from a poet alive to the hidden world of memory and imagination, of the sublime in the everyday, tempered always by a shadow of the fragility of life and love. There is an elegance and poise and care in the language of these poems, an unobtrusive mastery and ease in their cadences and rhythms. Here is writing so close to the sound of how our speech usually arranges itself, and yet set with a hard delicacy that makes it quite something else – memorable, direct, focused to the movement of how the poems present both thought and feeling. – Vincent O’Sullivan

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Pages: 88

Dimensions: 150 x 230 mm

It’s a clear night. Hamish and Wiremu crack stubbies of Waikato Draught. Burn what’s left from the outdoor season. Words between them are slow in coming. When they do come, they are spare and pointed. Tomorrow they will load rams on the Isuzu into a holding pen made from old pallets, for a man in Weymouth to fatten for Ramadan. It’s a clear night. Orion hurls his belt and sword into a pool of creosote. For Hamish, it will always be The Dipper. The beer is warm. The weed makes them cough. On the town side of the city border gridded fields of diodes glow and hum. – Dropped Pin: Razorback Road, Pōkeno Winner of the Kathleen Grattan Poetry Award 2021, poet Michael Steven’s Night School explores the gap between fathers and sons, the effects of toxic masculinity, how power corrupts and corrodes, and whether weed, art and aroha can save us in a godless world. ‘This is the poet as pilgrim, traveller, and astonished survivor. His sonorous verse has an impeccable lapidary quality, each word fitted like a stone in a wall. Phrase by phrase, sentence by sentence, writing with a lucid precision, Michael Steven patiently builds up his world view, always making sure we are with him, always allowing us to share the understanding.’ – David Eggleton, Judge’s Report Kathleen Grattan Poetry Award 2021

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Publication Date: 25-03-2022

An out-of-the-way corner of the South Island, the Catlins is a beautiful and relatively unspoilt area with many natural attractions, including that rare thing on the east coast, native forest. Neville Peat introduces the region – its flora, wildlife, bush walks, caves and waterfalls – before tracing the journey along the stunning Southern Scenic Route linking Otago, Southland and Fiordland.

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Pages: 72

Dimensions: 170 x 210 mm

Publication Date: 11-12-2017

Author Pamela Wood’s New Zealand Nurses draws on a wealth of nurses’ personal stories to identify the values, traditions, community and folklore of the nursing culture from 1880 – when hospital reforms began to formally introduce ‘modern nursing’ into New Zealand – to 1950, three years after New Zealand severed its final tie as part of the British Empire. In the late nineteenth century, British nurses who had been trained in the system established by Florence Nightingale began to spread across the world. This was the British nursing diaspora and New Zealand was its southernmost landfall. New Zealand Nurses explores the growth of a distinctly Kiwi nursing style and how nurses in this part of the globe responded to, and ultimately came to challenge, imperial influences. New Zealand Nurses is rich in detail and understated humour as it examines the nursing cultures that emerged in a range of different settings and circumstances: from hospitals to homes, rural backblocks to Māori settlements, and from war and disaster zones to nursing through a pandemic. A pleasure to read – there are lots of lively stories and it will have great appeal to nurses and former nurses. – Professor Barbara Brookes MNZM AUTHOR Pamela Wood is a retired academic, registered nurse and independent historian. She taught in undergraduate and postgraduate nursing programmes and postgraduate health programmes for 30 years and is the author of Dirt: Filth and decay in a New World Arcadia.

Bind: paperback

Dimensions: 240 x 170 mm

Publication Date: 30-03-2022

During the Covid-19 pandemic, eighteen thousand uncrossable kilometres lay between poet Majella Cullinane in Aotearoa New Zealand and her mother in Ireland, a distance unbridgeable even by phone as Cullinane’s mother’s language was lost to dementia. Meantime calls and keens across this terrible distance. With attentiveness, tenderness and extraordinary vulnerability, these poems speak directly to personal experience while also addressing a wider world shadowed and altered by illness, where everything once familiar and coherent is disintegrating, in flux, uncertain and strange. These poems are works of vigil and devotion, breathed into existence by a daughter who could not be at the bedside of her beloved, dying parent. Personal and universal in its themes, the poems in Meantime possess a gravitas born of sorrow, steeped in love. A warm and loving conversation about memory and forgetting, and a celebration of the power of voice to connect and heal, this is a collection for our times.

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Dimensions: 150 x 230 mm

Publication Date: 23-05-2024

In New Zealand, evangelical Christianity has always played a significant role. This book explores the fascinating story of the resurgence of evangelical Protestantism in the 1950s and 60s, and its pre-war origins.

The story focuses especially on evangelicals in the mainstream churches, in the universities, and in evangelical organisations. It is about the leading personalities, and the ideas that moved them, during a period when a moderate British-style evangelicalism was paramount.

The story of evangelical Protestantism has been extensively written about by historians in Britain and the US. This important book helps tell the New Zealand part of that story.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 300

Dimensions: 170 x 245 mm

Publication Date: 02-09-2013

The two world wars played an important role in the evolution of plastic and maxillofacial surgery in the first half of the 20th century. This book is about four of the key figures involved. Sir Harold Gillies and Sir Archibald McIndoe were born in Dunedin; McIndoe and Rainsford Mowlem studied medicine at the University of Otago Medical School, and Henry Pickerill was foundation Dean of the University of Otago Dental School.

The author describes how these surgeons revolutionised plastic surgery and the treatment of facial trauma, working on soldiers, fighter pilots and civilians disfigured by bombs, shrapnel and burns. Eventually Gillies et al. were supported by a vast surgical enterprise that included surgeons, dentists, anaesthetists, artists and photographers, nurses and orderlies.

The text is fully illustrated with photos, drawings and case notes by the surgeons and war artists at military hospitals at Boulogne-sur-Mer, Aldershot and Sidcup in the First World War, and civilian hospitals at East Grinstead, Basingstoke and Hill End in the Second. The book includes a DVD of Rainsford Mowlem performing a variety of plastic operations in 1945.

This book is a must for anyone interested in the history of medicine and the treatment of

casualties in the two world wars.

Bind: hardback

Pages: 264

Dimensions: 190 x 255 mm

Publication Date: 20-08-2013

This anthology addresses the mental health and therapeutic needs of Polynesian and Melanesian people and the scarcity of resources for those working with them. It is divided into four parts – Identity, Therapeutic Practice, Death and Dying, Reflexive Practice – that approach the concerns of Maori, Samoans, Tongans, Fijians and people from Tuvalu and Tokelau. Contributors include a wide range of writers, most of who are Maori or Pasifika. Poems by Serie Barford, Selina Tusitala Marsh and Tracey Tawhiao introduce each section.

As Pasifika populations expand, so do the issues generated by colonisation, intermarriage, assimilation, socioeconomic insecurity and international migration. The stresses of adolescence, identity, families, death and spirituality are all explored here in innovative

research that offers a wealth of inspiration and ideas to supportive family, friends and practitioners.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 332

Dimensions: 150 x 230 mm

Publication Date: 15-07-2013

Sometimes caring for patients can leave clinicians feeling overwhelmed with the daily tasks of doctoring. As an antidote, this book explores principles and assumptions of modern medicine seldom taught in medical school. Starting with the meaning of suffering and how the ‘science’ of medicine has evolved, the authors use many clinical stories to provide a fresh perspective on the work and roles of the modern doctor.

Based on many years of teaching family physicians, the book argues that being a doctor is much more than simply knowing biomedical facts and having good clinical skills. It explores some of the major challenges facing physicians, including the doctor–patient relationship, the ‘heartsink’ experience, and unwell patients for whom no disease can be found. The authors also introduce patient safety and self-care, two important issues for modern health professionals.

For experienced doctors as well as for students and doctors in training, Being a Doctor moves beyond biomedicine, providing useful insights that explain how both doctors and patients think and behave.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 276

Dimensions: 170 x 245 mm

Publication Date: 03-06-2013