Otago University Press (196)

Rushing For Gold

ISBN: 9781877578540

Authors: Lloyd Carpenter, Lyndon Fraser    Publisher: Otago University Press

Rushing for Gold is the first book to take a trans-Tasman look at the nineteenth-century phenomenon that was the gold rushes in Australia and New Zealand. It ex...


Rushing for Gold is the first book to take a trans-Tasman look at the nineteenth-century phenomenon that was the gold rushes in Australia and New Zealand. It explores links between the rushes, particularly those in Victoria and Otago, to show that they were strongly intertwined affairs. The book brings together contributions from both experienced and newly emergent researchers, who together provide a close examination of miners’ migration patterns, ethnicities and merchant networks. The contributors’ insightful analyses and narrative accounts of the places, commerce and heritage of the rushes reveal a pantheon of characters, from merchants, hoteliers, financiers and policemen to vagrants, sly-groggers and entertainers, not to mention women, all of whom prompted and populate the mythology of the era, which this book does much to unravel and rewrite.


Bind: paperback


Pages: 344


Dimensions: 150 x 230 mm


Publication Date: 18-03-2016


Tags: History   New Zealand
$45.00
Ghosts

ISBN: 9781988592985

Author: Siobhan Harvey    Publisher: Otago University Press

Far from dead, our ghosts live within us always … Poet Siobhan Harvey’s latest collection is about migration, outcasts, the search for home, and the ghosts ...


Far from dead, our ghosts live within us always … Poet Siobhan Harvey’s latest collection is about migration, outcasts, the search for home, and the ghosts we live with, including the ones who occupy our memories, ancestries and stories. It begins in a contemporary inner-city suburb where a poet starts to chart the regeneration she witnesses, its difficulties and opportunities. Along the way, the collection moves across time-zones, oceans and continents, breaking down personal and political walls, and unleashing ghosts everywhere. Ultimately, Ghosts is a work concerned with dislocation, rejection, homelessness, family trauma and how we can give voice to the lost souls inside us all.


Bind: paperback


Pages: 112


Dimensions: 230 x 150 mm


Tags: Poetry   New Zealand
$27.50
Women of the Catlins

ISBN: 9781877578977

Authors: Diana Noonan, Cris Antona    Publisher: Otago University Press

A haunting, off-the-beaten-track destination, the little-known Catlins region of New Zealand is as mysterious today as it ever was. In this first in-depth look ...


A haunting, off-the-beaten-track destination, the little-known Catlins region of New Zealand is as mysterious today as it ever was. In this first in-depth look at the lives of its inhabitants, award-winning writer Diana Noonan and photographer Cris Antona collaborate to capture the thoughts and feelings of 26 women from this remote outpost. As the subjects speak for themselves on topics as diverse as family, work, isolation and their relationship with the environment, there is, at last, an opportunity for readers to enter into the heart of this rugged, unknown landscape where few venture and only the strongest make it home.


Bind: paperback


Pages: 192


Dimensions: 250 x 230 mm


Publication Date: 15-04-2016


Tags: Biography   New Zealand
$49.95
THE WILDER YEARS - Selected poems

ISBN: 9781988592619

Author: David Eggleton    Publisher: Otago University Press

What is invariably terrific in Eggleton’s poetry is not only the relish of his attack, but the flash of lyric underwing colour as he dives on his prey. – IA...


What is invariably terrific in Eggleton’s poetry is not only the relish of his attack, but the flash of lyric underwing colour as he dives on his prey. – IAN WEDDE David Eggleton, Poet Laureate of Aotearoa 2019–21, has published nine poetry collections, and now, finally, comes a ‘Best Of ’. The Wilder Years: Selected Poems is a hardback compendium of the poet’s own selection from 35 years of published work, together with a handful of new poems. Cover art by Nigel Brown. About David Eggleton’s poetry: Eggleton’s word-blasts remain consistently gratifying. His poetry’s ... endlessly imaginative, it’s funny, [and] intellectually rewarding … Every poem is a snapshot of the culture in action. – NICK ASCROFT Vital, elastic, expertly handled language in a Pacific voice of cultural and musical sensibility, poetry to be spoken aloud or in-the-mind. – CILLA McQUEEN … vivid, fizzy and smart. – GRANT SMITHIES


Bind: hardback


Pages: 314


Dimensions: 220 x 170 mm


Publication Date: 25-03-2021


Tags: New Zealand   Poetry
$40.00
Ka Ngaro Te Reo

ISBN: 9781927322413

Author: Paul Moon    Publisher: Otago University Press

Ka ngaro te reo, ka ngaro taua, pera i te ngaro o te moa. If the language be lost, man will be lost, as dead as the moa. In 1800, te reo Māori was the only lan...


Ka ngaro te reo, ka ngaro taua, pera i te ngaro o te moa. If the language be lost, man will be lost, as dead as the moa. In 1800, te reo Māori was the only language spoken in New Zealand. By 1899, it was on the verge of disappearing altogether. In Ka Ngaro Te Reo, Paul Moon traces the spiralling decline of the language during an era of prolonged colonisation that saw political, economic, cultural and linguistic power shifting steadily into the hands of the European core. In this revelatory and hard-hitting account, Moon draws on a vast range of published and archival material, as well as oral histories and contemporary Māori accounts, to chart the tortuous journey of a language under siege in a relentless European campaign to ‘save and civilize the remnant of the Maori Race’. He also chronicles the growing commitment among many Māori towards the end of the nineteenth century to ensure that the language would survive.


Bind: paperback


Pages: 280


Dimensions: 150 x 230 mm


Publication Date: 15-04-2016


$39.95
We Will Not Cease

ISBN: 9781988592992

Publisher: Otago University Press

To oppose the military machine means to accept the possibility that one may be destroyed by it. – Archibald Baxter We Will Not Cease is the unflinching accoun...


To oppose the military machine means to accept the possibility that one may be destroyed by it. – Archibald Baxter We Will Not Cease is the unflinching account of New Zealander Archibald Baxter’s brutal treatment as a conscientious objector during World War I. In 1915, when Baxter was 33, he was arrested, sent to prison, then shipped under guard to Europe where he was forced to the front line against his will. Punished to the limits of his physical and mental endurance, Baxter was stripped of all dignity, beaten, starved and left for dead by the New Zealand military. In the final attempt to discredit him authorities consigned him to a mental institution, an experience that would haunt him for the rest of his life. Long regarded as a classic, We Will Not Cease is as relevant now as when it was first published in 1939. This revised edition has a new foreword by Kevin Clements (foundation director of the National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies), a brand new cover, and a full index.


Bind: paperback


Pages: 216


Dimensions: 210 x 148 mm


Publication Date: 01-03-2021


$30.00
When I Reach For Your Pulse

ISBN: 9781990048616

Author: Rushi Vyas    Publisher: Otago University Press

In this electrifying debut, Rushi Vyas untangles slippery personal and political histories in the wake of a parent’s suicide. ‘When my father finally / died...


In this electrifying debut, Rushi Vyas untangles slippery personal and political histories in the wake of a parent’s suicide. ‘When my father finally / died,’ he writes, ‘we […] burned, / like an effigy, the voiceless body.’ In this tough and tender, gently powerful collection, grief returns us to elemental silence, where ‘the wind is a muted vowel in the brush of pine / branches’. These poems reach into this deep silence and bring back evidence of life as well as loss. This language listens as much as it sings, asking if it is possible to recover from the muting effects of British colonialism, American imperialism, patriarchy and caste hierarchies. Which cultural legacies do we release in order to heal? Which do we keep alive, and which keep us alive? A monument to yesterday and a path to tomorrow, When I Reach for Your Pulse reminds us of both the burden and the promise of inheritance. ‘[T]he wail outlasts / the dream,’ but time falls like water and so ‘the stream survives its source.’


Bind: paperback


Pages: 124


Dimensions: 150 x 230 mm


Publication Date: 01-09-2023


Tags: New Release   Poetry   New Zealand
$30.00
In A Slant Light

ISBN: 9781877578717

Author: Cilla McQueen    Publisher: Otago University Press

In this absorbing poetic memoir of her early life, Cilla McQueen, one of New Zealand’s major women poets, leads us over the stepping stones of childhood memor...


In this absorbing poetic memoir of her early life, Cilla McQueen, one of New Zealand’s major women poets, leads us over the stepping stones of childhood memory, some half submerged, some strong and glinting in the light of her wit: In the large lead shoe X-ray machine at the back of the shoe shop, our skeletal feet appeared at the press of a button. We irradiated ourselves further when the shop assistant wasn’t looking. … I tried the magic trick of pulling the tablecloth out from under our plates of tomato soup. This didn’t work. With humour and openness, clarity and grace, the memoir continues through her teenage years and the excitement and turbulence, the expansion and vulnerability, of university days and early motherhood in the 1960s and 1970s … raising a young child alone, falling in love with Ralph Hotere and witnessing his deeply immersive artistic practice … This account of the life of an extraordinary verbal artist is immensely warm and welcoming: time falls away as we read. The lightness of Cilla’s touch coupled with the grit of her endurance through challenging personal circumstances makes the reader feel privileged to be invited in to the quiet wisdom worn here with both integrity and modesty. From the sweet shocks of her imagery to the joy of recognition of many shared experiences of a New Zealand childhood, this memoir brings a honeyed, sensitive yet utterly resilient voice in our local literature as close as the voice of a good friend. This is a book not only for those who love Cilla McQueen’s poetry, but for anyone fascinated by the social, artistic and literary history of New Zealand.


Bind: hardback


Pages: 134


Dimensions: 165 x 235 mm


Publication Date: 13-05-2016


$35.00
Nothing For It But To Sing

ISBN: 9781927322628

Author: Michael Harlow    Publisher: Otago University Press

Michael Harlow’s poems are small detonations that release deeply complex stories of psychological separations and attractions, of memory and desire. Frequentl...


Michael Harlow’s poems are small detonations that release deeply complex stories of psychological separations and attractions, of memory and desire. Frequently they slip into the alluring spaces just at the edges of language, dream and gesture, as they carefully lower, like measuring gauges, into the ineffable: intimations of mortality, the slippery nature of identity, longing, fear … Harlow is a poet with such a command of music, the dart and turn of movement in language, that he can get away with words that make us squirm in apprentice workshops or bad pop songs – heart, soul – and make them seem newly shone and psychically right. The work is sequined by sound, rather than running its meaning along the rigid rails of metre and end rhyme. The sway and surge of various meanings in the phrasing, and the way sense trails and winds over line breaks: this movement itself often evokes the alternating dark and electric energy of feelings like love, loss and the pain of absence. This is a beautifully honed new collection.


Bind: paperback


Pages: 100


Dimensions: 150 x 235 mm


Publication Date: 22-08-2016


$25.00
Tung

ISBN: 9781990048609

Author: Robyn Marie Pickens    Publisher: Otago University Press

Tung is the keenly anticipated debut collection from award-winning Ōtepoti-Dunedin poet, Robyn Maree Pickens. Earth-centred and life-affirming, these poems off...


Tung is the keenly anticipated debut collection from award-winning Ōtepoti-Dunedin poet, Robyn Maree Pickens. Earth-centred and life-affirming, these poems offer sustenance and repair to a planet in the grips of a socio-ecological crisis. Pickens is an eco-pioneer of words, attuned to the fine murmurings of the earth and to the louder sound and content of human languages (English, Spanish, Japanese and Finnish). She finds and draws out the beauty in both. Hers is a unique response, linguistically rich and innovative, pushing at received notions, challenging the zeitgeist, alive with innovative typographic and sonic creativity. Tung is not afraid of new shapes or new rhythms, orchestrating a gorgeous score that testifies to the shared relationship between the human and non-human worlds. Over the roar and the din, Robyn Maree Pickens creates her sound. And it sounds like hope.


Bind: paperback


Dimensions: 150 x 230 mm


Publication Date: 01-08-2023


Tags: Poetry   New Zealand
$25.00
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