This is the first complete edition of Katherine Mansfield’s poetry, including 26 poems, dating from 1909–10, discovered by Gerri Kimber in the Newberry Library in Chicago in 2015. This edition is made up of 217 poems, ordered chronologically, so that the reader can follow Mansfield’s development as a poet and her experiments with different forms, as well as tracing the themes – love and death, the natural world and the seasons, childhood and friendship, music and song – that preoccupied her throughout her writing life. The comprehensive annotations provide illuminating biographical information as well as explaining the rich contexts of the European poetic tradition, including fin de siècle decadence within which Mansfield’s artistry is steeped. The inclusion of a collection of newly discovered poems, highlights Mansfield’s desire to be taken seriously as a poet from her earliest beginnings as a writer. The poems as a whole point to a poet who varied her craft as she perfected it, often witty and ironic yet always enchanted by the sound of words.

Bind: hardback

Pages: 224

Dimensions: 160 x 240 mm

Publication Date: 05-11-2016

Everyone knows Australia was once a penal colony, but few realise that New Zealander prisoners were sent there. During the mid-nineteenth century at least 110 people were transported from New Zealand to serve time as convict labourers in the penal colony of Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania). Even more were sentenced by colonial judges to the harsh punishment of transportation, but somehow managed to avoid being sent across the Tasman Sea. In examining the remarkable experiences of unremarkable people, this fascinating book provides insights into the lives of people like William Phelps Pickering, a self-made entrepreneur turned criminal; Margaret Reardon, a potential accomplice to murder and convicted perjurer; and Te Kumete, a Māori warrior transported as a rebel. Their stories, and others like them, reveal a complex society overseen by a governing class intent on cleansing the colony of what was considered to be a burgeoning criminal underclass. This lively book also offers insights into penal servitude in Van Diemen’s Land as revealed through the lived experiences of the men and sole woman transported from New Zealand. Whether Māori men serving time for political infractions, white-collar criminals, labourers, vagrants or the soldiers sent to fight the empire’s wars, each convict’s experiences reveal something about the way in which the British Empire sought to discipline, punish and reform those who trespassed against it.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 284

Dimensions: 150 x 230 mm

Publication Date: 10-11-2017

Science can be as wondrous as the explanations that come out of earth-rooted cultures. Polynesians, like the inhabitants of Oceania generally, have always lived in a state of heightened awareness of the profundity and subtlety of nature’s moods and interrelationships. Theirs was a holistic view of the world and their place in it. In this beautifully written and stunningly illustrated book, David Young focuses on the increasingly endangered resource of freshwater, and what so-called developed societies can learn from the indigenous voices of the Pacific. Combining nineteenth century and indigenous sources with a selection of modern studies and his own personal encounters, Young keeps a human face on the key issue of water. He confirms that the gift of indigenous people to their colonisers is that they offer systematic and different concepts of being in, and experiencing, nature. It is time people woke up to the dangers and began to embrace possible solutions, Young argues in this inspiring and deeply moving study. Current trends in water management are not only wasteful and destructive but also ultimately deadly. He concludes, however, on a hopeful note, arguing that there is potential for change. The future rests on developing the discipline of deep respect for place, for planet and for life in its myriad forms. Woven by Water …gives us information and analysis plus feeling; it doesn’t simply inform, it resonates ... I commend it wholeheartedly. – Michael King For a long time David Young has been one of the clearest and most respected writers on New Zealand ecology, a champion for what its people hold in trust. – Vincent O’Sullivan

Bind: paperback

Pages: 288

Dimensions: 189 x 253 mm

Publication Date: 01-10-2021

Miriam Sharland’s eco-memoir Heart Stood Still is the latest title in the Ka Haea Te Ata series from Otago University Press, a series dedicated to casting light on issues of importance in Aotearoa today. In early 2020 Sharland was nearing the end of a 17-year adventure in Aotearoa. A desire to return to family and the familiar was pulling her back to her homeland, England. When Covid put an end to her travel plans, she found herself facing isolation in Manawatū instead. Despite her initial unhappiness, Sharland came to see this strange and unexpected time as a gift – an opportunity to explore the natural beauty of the home she’d known for many years but had not fully seen or appreciated. Her explorations were grounding, and she began to examine what it means to truly ‘belong.’ Heart Stood Still is a record of Sharland’s journey towards finding healing in the world’s natural beauty, a beauty that we must fight to protect in the current climate crisis. It is both a memoir and a lyrical portrait of Manawatū. Through a series of personal essays that follow the pattern of the seasons, Sharland skilfully weaves reflections on her life and family history with observations on the native and introduced plants and animals about her; all tinged with her experience as ‘an unsettled settler’ in Aotearoa. Readers who enjoy books such as Olivia Laing’s To the River (2017), Ingrid Horrocks’ Where We Swim (2020) and Patricia Grace’s From the Centre (2021) will appreciate the quiet, contemplative nature of Heart Stood Still.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 184

Dimensions: 148 x 210 mm

Publication Date: 22-04-2024

The Paper Nautilus is about loss – the forms it takes, how we go on living in the face of it, and the mysterious ways that new life and new beginnings are born of brokenness. The paper nautilus provides a vivid image of this interplay of death and rebirth since, for new life to begin, the angelically beautiful but fragile shell that sustained a former life must be shattered. Michael Jackson has recourse to his ethnographic fieldwork among the Kuranko of Sierra Leone, as well as autobiography and fiction, in exploring his theme. This book crosses and blends genres most engagingly. Beginning as a series of essays, it gradually morphs into a mesmerising work of the imagination in which the boundary between author and other becomes blurred, and the line between fact and fiction erased.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 224

Dimensions: 130 x 198 mm

Publication Date: 01-11-2019

To the Occupant takes the everyday and transforms it into something fine and precious and enduring. With an unsparing attention, Emma Neale creates shape-shifting poems that confound prejudices and subvert expectations. Displaying verve and confidence, her poetry is filled with musicality and dynamic language, always observant to the world and its details. The striking imagery and emotional range of her work never veer into sentimentality. These poems engage with the full spectrum of human emotion and experience, the hauntings of history, the cold hand of social inequality, and the long contrail of intimate cruelties. They challenge the open and latent violence of contemporary life, from refugee crises to rape, poverty and mental illness to climate change, while revealing the extraordinary in the everyday, where a child’s-eye view of the world can witness the wonder of the new or the shadow of darkness. Whimiscal typographical experiments and prose poems sit next to reimagined fables (the Big Bad Wolf repurposed as inner demon), deliciously light-handed satire, and quietly powerful insights into the contemporary political terrain. To the Occupant is an innovative and astounding collection from one of New Zealand’s leading writers of her generation.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 80

Dimensions: 150 x 230 mm

After Sarah Jane Barnett had a hysterectomy in her forties, a comment by her doctor that she wouldn’t be “less of a woman” prompted her to investigate what the concept of womanhood meant to her. Part memoir, part feminist manifesto, part coming-of-middle-age story, Notes on Womanhood is the result. Here, Barnett examines the devastation she inflicted on herself as a young woman, the invisibility she feels as her youth fades, the power of female friendship, the stories women learn about midlife and menopause, and how being the daughter of a transgender woman changed her ideas of womanhood. ‘This book is a conversation with myself about my own womanhood,’ Barnett says. ‘The act of looking showed me the stitches: Western society’s beauty standards, the male gaze, a fear of aging, hair and gender, care work, my grandmother, life stage transitions, orca whales and tramping. All the authors I read – Darcey Steinke, Alok Vaid-Menon, Megan Jayne Crabbe, Maggie Nelson, Reni Eddo-Lodge, Judith Butler, Barbara Brookes, Natalie Wynn, Ani Mikaere, Atul Gawande and many more – explore ideas about gender, aging and society in a way that opened a door to the next idea. I kept on walking through those doors. The result is what I am calling my “coming-of-middle-age” story.’

Bind: paperback

Publication Date: 23-06-2022

Aotearoa New Zealand was recently rated by the Lonely Planet travel guide as the second most ‘gay friendly’ country in the world, with some of the most advanced human rights legislation. Research suggests, however, that New Zealand’s relatively ‘inclusive’ social climate is not always reflected in our educational settings. This book explores how the assumption that heterosexuality is the norm operates in education, and the discriminatory effects of this for teachers, for students, and for parents, in early childhood education, schools, tertiary and alternative settings. How can education settings become more socially just sites of inclusion for sexual and gender diversity? Contributors from a wide range of sectors discuss their research and invite others to join them in resisting the many injustices perpetuated by the unchecked discriminatory discourses that have shaped New Zealand education historically, and which continue to do so today.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 256

Dimensions: 150 x 230 mm

Publication Date: 01-12-2015

Peat starts out as Lynn Jenner’s study of the Kāpiti Expressway, built between 2013 and 2017 and passing, at its nearest point, about a kilometre from her own house. She decides to create a kind of archive of the construction of this so-called Road of National Significance. How did it come to be built? What is its character? Who will win and who will lose from its construction? What will be its impact on the local environment? Jenner begins a quest to find a fellow writer with different sensibilities to help her think about the natural world the road traverses. New Zealand-born poet, editor, art collector and philanthropist Charles Brasch is her choice. Researching Brasch will be her refuge from the constant pile-driving and the sprawling concrete, and perhaps the poet will offer some ways of thinking that will help her understand contemporary events. She reads and reflects on Brasch’s memoir, some of his poems, his journals and his letters to the local paper. She thinks about Brasch in the context of his family and New Zealand in the 1940s–60s, and she reads local papers. She reads the official handouts about the road and listens to people in her local community when they talk about the road. From there Lynn Jenner carefully builds her unconventional text, layer upon layer, into an intelligent and beautifully refracted work that is haunting, fearless, and utterly compelling.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 286

Dimensions: 150 x 230 mm

Publication Date: 16-07-2019

In Forms of Freedom Dougal McNeill explores how the creative literary imagination can influence progressive social change in the real world. In engaging prose and with impressive intellectual range, McNeill applies insights from Marxist critical theory to the works of selected Aotearoa New Zealand and Australian writers. From Harry Holland, Henry Lawson and Mary Gilmore responding to the legacy of Robert Burns in the nineteenth century, to twenty-first-century novelists applying their literary imaginations to intersectional spaces and Indigenous, settler, gendered and international freedom traditions, McNeill reveals literature’s capacity to find potent forms with which to articulate concepts of, and beliefs about, freedom. McNeill’s argument for literature as an essential ‘form of freedom’ is a resonant call for our times. Incorporating discussion of work by 13 authors from both sides of the Tasman, Forms of Freedom is an essential book for students and researchers of Aotearoa New Zealand and Australian literature. Authors whose work is discussed in Forms of Freedom include: Pip Adam; Mary Gilmore; Patricia Grace; Dorothy Hewett; Harry Holland; Eve Langley; Henry Lawson; Amanda Lohrey; Elsie Locke; Emily Perkins; Alice Tawhai; Hone Tuwhare; Ellen van Neerven; Albert Wendt.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 248

Dimensions: 150 x 230 mm

Publication Date: 15-08-2024