Otago University Press (196)

Brass Band To Follow

ISBN: 9781990048043

Author: Bryan Walpert    Publisher: Otago University Press

Bryan Walpert’s fourth collection of lyric poems ranges in its focus from flowers to infinities, from laundry to eternity, but is founded most fully on what i...


Bryan Walpert’s fourth collection of lyric poems ranges in its focus from flowers to infinities, from laundry to eternity, but is founded most fully on what it is to move into middle age – to wait still for life’s promised brass band to arrive. Whether writing from the perspective of a parent watching childhood slip away or ventriloquising the 17th-century scientific language of Robert Hooke and Robert Boyle to craft surprising love poems, he engages the world with a keen and often witty perception, a deft juggling of the sentence, and a sense of wonder. Frequently playful in approach, the poems are always serious in their engagement with the bewildering nature of time passing – of growing up, and growing old. AUTHOR Bryan Walpert is the author of three previous collections of poetry – Etymology, A History of Glass and most recently Native Bird. He is also the author of a novella, Late Sonata, winner of the Seizure Viva La Novella prize; a collection of short fiction, Ephraim’s Eyes; and two scholarly books: Poetry and Mindfulness: Interruption to a Journey, and Resistance to Science in Contemporary American Poetry. His work has appeared in New Zealand, Australia, the UK, the US and Canada, and has been recognised by the Montreal International Poetry Award, the New Zealand International Poetry Competition and the James Wright Poetry Award (US). He is a professor in creative writing at Massey University, Auckland. More on Bryan can be found at bryanwalpert.com.


Bind: paperback


Pages: 96


Dimensions: 148 x 210 mm


Publication Date: 01-05-2021


Tag: Poetry
$27.50
To The Mountains

ISBN: 9781988531205

Authors: Laurence Fearnley, Paul Hersey    Publisher: Otago University Press

The air temperature was probably -35 degrees Celsius with wind chill. We couldn’t stand still for long. Our brains felt taxed and our bodies were running on e...


The air temperature was probably -35 degrees Celsius with wind chill. We couldn’t stand still for long. Our brains felt taxed and our bodies were running on empty. On the Football Field not far from the summit, Sue discovered a square of chocolate. We shared it, telling our bodies we didn’t need more. As we continued the descent, the air warmed and filled with oxygen. We began to encounter climbers heading up. Most knew who we were, incredulously asking: ‘are you the girls who slept on the summit’? – Karen McNeill, ‘A Ridge Too Far: The first female ascent of Denali’s Cassin Ridge’ A schoolgirl races from class to join a weekend trip to the hills. A mountaineering guide recalls his first weeks on the job during the 1920s. A young climber is shown the best route over the Main Divide by a big bull thar. A climbing party is bombarded by falling rock when Ruapehu suddenly erupts. A mountaineer pays tribute to the Māori guides from south Westland, while a fighter pilot tries to recapture an ascent of the Minarets from his tent in Nigeria during World War II. From the Darrans of Fiordland to Denali in Alaska, New Zealand climbers, both experienced and recreational, have captured their alpine experience in letters, journals, articles, memoirs, poems and novels. Drawing on 150 years of published and unpublished material, Laurence Fearnley and Paul Hersey, two top contemporary authors, have compiled a wide-ranging, fascinating and moving glimpse into New Zealand’s mountaineering culture and the people who write about it.


Bind: hardback


Pages: 372


Dimensions: 150 x 230 mm


Publication Date: 12-06-2018


$45.00
Artefacts of Encounter

ISBN: 9781877578694

Author: Nicholas Thomas    Publisher: Otago University Press

The Pacific artefacts and works of art collected during the three voyages of Captain James Cook and the navigators, traders and missionaries who followed him ar...


The Pacific artefacts and works of art collected during the three voyages of Captain James Cook and the navigators, traders and missionaries who followed him are of foundational importance for the study of art and culture in Oceania. These collections are representative not only of technologies or belief systems but of indigenous cultures at the formative stages of their modern histories, and exemplify Islanders’ institutions, cosmologies and social relationships. Recently, scholars from the Pacific and further afield, working with Pacific artefacts at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge (MAA), have set out to challenge and rethink some longstanding assumptions on their significance. The Cook voyage collection at the MAA is among the four or five most important in the world, containing over 200 of the 2000-odd objects with Cook voyage provenance that are dispersed throughout the world. The collection includes some 100 artefacts dating from Cook’s first voyage. This stunning book catalogues this collection, and its cutting-edge scholarship sheds new light on the significance of many artefacts of encounter. • Hundreds of sumptuous photographs of artefacts collected on the voyages of Captain Cook and by traders and missionaries who followed him • Cutting-edge scholarship • Large-format jacketed hardback


Bind: hardback


Pages: 348


Dimensions: 285 x 250 mm


Publication Date: 17-06-2016


Tag: History
$70.00
Power to Win : The Living Wage Movement in Aotearoa New Zealand

ISBN: 9781990048753

Author: Lyndy McIntyre    Publisher: Otago University Press

The Living Wage means thriving, not just surviving. Lyndy McIntyre’s Power to Win tells the story of the living wage movement in Aotearoa New Zealand. The liv...


The Living Wage means thriving, not just surviving. Lyndy McIntyre’s Power to Win tells the story of the living wage movement in Aotearoa New Zealand. The living wage movement is grounded in the fundamental belief that all New Zealanders should be paid enough to meet their needs, enjoy their lives and participate in society. Yet, from the 1980s, with the gap between rich and poor growing and poverty increasing, more and more workers could no longer afford to aspire to this quality of life. The question of how to rectify resultant social inequities was becoming urgent. In Power to Win, McIntyre documents the history of the Living Wage Movement Aotearoa New Zealand from these roots to the present day. This is the story of the movement’s efforts to lift the wages of the most disadvantaged people in our workforce – women, Māori, Pacific Peoples, migrants and refugees, and young workers. McIntyre provides a window into the lives of these workers and those committed to ending in-work poverty: the activists, faith groups, unions and community organisations who come together to tilt the axis of power from employers to low-wage workers. Power to Win is the record of an extraordinarily successful movement. It is a celebration of hope and an inspiring read. This book shows that communities have power and that change can happen.


Bind: paperback


Pages: 285


Dimensions: 150 x 230 mm


Publication Date: 04-07-2024


$45.00
DUE > 4th Jul 2024
Edgeland

ISBN: 9781988531274

Author: David Eggleton    Publisher: Otago University Press

The poetry in David Eggleton’s new collection possesses an intensity and driven energy, using the poet’s recognisable signature oratory voice, strong in bea...


The poetry in David Eggleton’s new collection possesses an intensity and driven energy, using the poet’s recognisable signature oratory voice, strong in beat and measure, rooted in rich traditions of chant, lament and ode. Mashing together the lyrical and the slangy, celebrating local vernaculars while simultaneously plugged in to a global zeitgeist of technobabble and fake news, Eggleton recycles and ‘repurposes’ high visual culture and demotic aural culture. Edgeland offers a tragicomic and surreal skewering of the cons, swindles, posturings and flaws of damaged people on the make, dislocating the reader with high speed jinks and swerves. A satirical eye interrogates ‘data’, media bilge, opinion, social change, extreme experience, and worst-case-scenario extrapolations. A menagerie of vivid characters burst off the page – including the man who mistook the moon for a candy bar, instigators, prestidigitators, procurators, promulgators, Zorro and Governor Grey – alongside a survey of 35 types of beard, an ode to ooze, metadada, Gordon Ramsay’s pan-sizzled bull’s pizzle, a Baxterian moa, and various other waka jumpers hailing from Jafaville to Jack’s Blowhole. Edgeland is a dazzling display of polychromatic virtuosity, teeming with irrepressible wordplay, startling imagery and anarchic wit, from one of New Zealand’s best-loved poets


Bind: paperback


Pages: 112


Dimensions: 150 x 230 mm


$27.50
Unfortunate Folk

ISBN: 9781877276095

Publisher: Otago University Press

From electro-convulsive therapy to epilepsy, from criminal lunacy to community care, 'Unfortunate Folk': Essays on Mental Health Treatment, 1863-1992, opens win...


From electro-convulsive therapy to epilepsy, from criminal lunacy to community care, 'Unfortunate Folk': Essays on Mental Health Treatment, 1863-1992, opens windows on to the history of mental health treatment in New Zealand. It is one of the few books available on the history of mental health in New Zealand.


Bind: paperback


Pages: 304


Dimensions: 150 x 230 mm


Tag:
$39.95
O me voy o te vas One of us must go

ISBN: 9781990048425

Authors: Rogelio Guedea, Roger Hickin    Publisher: Otago University Press

Poetry by Rogelio Guedea With English translations by Roger Hickin • New collection from award-winning poet and novelist • Spanish / English bilingual poet...


Poetry by Rogelio Guedea With English translations by Roger Hickin • New collection from award-winning poet and novelist • Spanish / English bilingual poetry • Themes of love, loss, intimacy and estrangement In Rogelio Guedea’s bold new poetry collection, O me voy o te vas / One of us must go (with English translations by Roger Hickin), love is a powerful magnet that attracts and repels in equal measure. In language both lyrical and spare, Guedea examines what it means to share one’s life with another person and questions whether – and how – love can survive reality’s steady tap-drip repetitions. This is the mesmerising tale of two people who stumble over one another time and time again, yet whose every word and action adds another stitch to a close, personal tapestry of memories and familiarity. Unashamedly domestic, this collection captures every kind of tenderness felt in an intimately involved life. O me voy o te vas / One of us must go is a true love story, a chronicle of romantic survivalism. To write against your love is to write about your love: is to love you another way, is to love you in every way. – XXVIII


Bind: paperback


Dimensions: 150 x 230 mm


Publication Date: 20-09-2022


Tag: Poetry
$25.00
The Lives of Coat Hangers

ISBN: 9781927322376

Author: Sudesh Mishra    Publisher: Otago University Press

In Sudesh Mishra’s new collection the opening poem, ‘The Capacious Muse’, acts as a manifesto or declaration of intent. It’s a sequence of aphoristic se...


In Sudesh Mishra’s new collection the opening poem, ‘The Capacious Muse’, acts as a manifesto or declaration of intent. It’s a sequence of aphoristic sentences that begins: ‘The muse will not proscribe.’ In other words, this poet will not rule anything out as the fit subject for a poem. Sudesh Mishra is a philosophical poet, one preoccupied not only with how meaning is made, but with how meaning is manifested in the modern world. His poetry is rich in the truths revealed by humble, humdrum objects, as in the title poem, ‘The Lives of Coat Hangers’: They wait for a latch to raise an eyebrow, For a shadow to step in from the light. They long to be held in the arms of a coat … Subtle, witty, linguistically adept and internationally well travelled, Sudesh Mishra is a poet whose range of reference traverses global culture. An ambitious and accomplished writer, one able to brilliantly reinvent language, myth and metaphor, his fifth collection confirms him as a major poetic voice in the South Pacific. … a poet with imagination to burn – Murray Bramwell, Adelaide Review Mishra’s development as a poet shows in the restrained, formal, technical brilliance of the poems –Briar Wood, The Contemporary Pacific


Bind: paperback


Pages: 144


Dimensions: 150 x 235 mm


Publication Date: 29-01-2016


$25.00
The Prison Diary of A.C. Barrington

ISBN: 9781927322314

Author: John Pratt    Publisher: Otago University Press

A.C. (Archie) Barrington was a leading New Zealand pacifist during World War 2. Incarcerated in Mount Crawford Prison for his beliefs in 1941, he kept an illici...


A.C. (Archie) Barrington was a leading New Zealand pacifist during World War 2. Incarcerated in Mount Crawford Prison for his beliefs in 1941, he kept an illicit diary, scrawled in the margins of books. Many years later his son John happened across the diary and painstakingly reconstructed it. Such documents are exceptionally rare – until recent times prisoners were not allowed to keep any record of their experiences and many were illiterate anyway. Barrington vividly and compellingly recorded the squalid, rundown conditions, monotonous and exhausting labour, the intense cold from which there was little protection, and the strategies he and his fellow pacifists adopted to enable them to cope with prison life. John Pratt has edited the diary and provides a fascinating commentary on the issues it raises in relation to prison life then and now. He also addresses a fundamental question – what were Barrington and his like doing in prison, when similar expressions of dissent would almost certainly have been ignored in Australia or Britain? Why was New Zealand, with its ‘fair go’, egalitarian reputation, so intolerant and punitive? Pratt chronicles a history of intolerance, suspicion and deep-seated antipathies that may go some way towards explaining the current penal saturation in this ‘friendly’ land.


Bind: paperback


Pages: 280


Dimensions: 150 x 230 mm


Publication Date: 19-02-2016


Tags: Biography   New Zealand   History
$39.95
Pushing Boundaries

ISBN: 9781927322178

Author: Hugh Morrison    Publisher: Otago University Press

We know a lot about the early missionaries who came to New Zealand from 1814 and how Christianity developed through their complex interactions with Māori. Less...


We know a lot about the early missionaries who came to New Zealand from 1814 and how Christianity developed through their complex interactions with Māori. Less well known are the ways in which settler churches of Aotearoa New Zealand reached out to engage in missionary activity in other parts of the world. Pushing Boundaries is the first book-length attempt to tell the story of the evolution of overseas missionary activity by New Zealand’s Protestant churches from the early nineteenth century up to World War II. In this thought-provoking book, Hugh Morrison outlines how and why missions became important to colonial churches – the theological and social reasons churches supported missions, how their ideas were shaped, and what motivated individual New Zealanders to leave these shores to devote their lives elsewhere. Secondly, he connects this local story to some larger historical themes – of gender, culture, empire, childhood and education. This book argues that understanding the overseas missionary activity of Protestant churches and groups can contribute to a more general understanding of how New Zealand has developed as a society and nation.


Bind: paperback


Pages: 340


Dimensions: 150 x 230 mm


Publication Date: 19-02-2016


$45.00
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