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Victoria University Press is New Zealand's leading publisher of new fiction and poetry, and a scholarly publisher specialising in NZ history, biography and essays. Founded in the 1970s, VUP now has a backlist of over 200 books in print and issues on average 25 new titles every year. You can follow us on

Book News

Upcoming event

January 17, 2012

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wednesday, 15 February 2012, 7.30-9pm

Poets reading from their own work, and reading from each other’s, and generally giving the idea of poetry as words on edge a run for its money. Or as Ian Wedde has it, putting words 'on the edges of their seats, at the edges of the known universe, where speaking, writing, and telling get shuffled in the language deck. Edgy words, words on high alert.’

This event is free, Fergus Barrowman will steer, and an edgy time is guaranteed.

The poets

Amy Brown is teaching creative writing and completing her PhD at the University of Melbourne.  Her first poetry collection, The Propaganda Poster Girl (VUP, 2008) was shortlisted for a Montana New Zealand Book Award.

Lynn Jenner’s Dear Sweet Harry won the Adam Foundation Prize for Creative Writing and the Society of Authors Jessie McKay prize for Best First Book of Poetry.

Aleksandra Lane completed her MA in Creative Writing at the IIML (Victoria University) in 2010, and was awarded the Biggs Poetry Prize for her portfolio.

Ian Wedde teaches in the departments of English and Art History at Auckland University. He has published dozens of works and is the current New Zealand Poet Laureate.

 

Merry Christmas from VUP!

December 13, 2011

Everyone at VUP would like to wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! It's been another great year of publishing, we hope you've liked the books and we've plenty more in store for the new year.

The office will be closed from the 21st of December 2011 until the 9th of January, 2012.

Please note that if you are ordering from the website, orders received after the 16th of December will not be processed until the office reopens.

 

 

The Exercise work-out for your mind

December 16, 2011 |

Show, don’t tell. Write what you know. Do this, do that. Actually, despite its name, this book is not a manual. It doesn’t offer a step-by-step training programme that will turn you into a novelist or screenwriter or poet. Some of the ideas here are contradictory. Some of them look pretty silly. But if writing well is the thing that matters to you, then The Exercise Bookshould give your imagination a good work-out.

 

Hot off the press from the desks of the IIML and beyond, The Exercise Book is the perfect tool for aspiring and established writers to add to their creative tool box. Check out these extracts on the new IIML blog.

 

Recent fabulous events

December 2, 2011 | Book launches

Two excellent new collections of poetry were launched recently. Joan Fleming's The Same As Yes and Rachel Bush's Nice Pretty Things.

 

Harry Ricketts' full launch speech for Joan's book can be read here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dora Malech also sent the following note:

"It is my honor and pleasure to add my voice to the celebration of the launching of Joan Fleming’s beautiful debut collection The Same as Yes. When Joan was my MA student at the IIML in 2007, I was consistently struck by the ways in which she wove the visually luminous and the verbally musical together. I was also struck, in her poetry and in her person, by a kind of openness and searching that I am tempted to call moral or spiritual. These qualities have only deepened and cohered further in the poems in this debut. I wish that I could be present in person to celebrate the launch of this book, but it’s my privilege to add my disembodied voice from another hemisphere to this celebration of all of the very-much-embodied and present voices in Joan’s poems.

“I used to come from you, and you from me, but you probably don’t remember,” says a cloud to the top of a plantation pine in The Same as Yes. These poems ask us to remember our interconnectedness with not only other people, but with the creatures, places, and objects of the world; they ask the reader to observe not only through new eyes, but through new ears, to attend to the heard and unheard voices all around us. Joan’s poems take us far beyond mere personification. They “animate” their world, not in the Disney sense, but in the primal sense carried by the Latin root “anima”: the sense of “soul” and “life.”

With equal and inseparable parts whimsy and weight, with gentle dazzle and fierce lyricism, the poems in “The Same as Yes” ask us to renew our vows with attention, and thus to renew our vows with our world.  Reading these poems is, indeed, an affirmation of those vows, a saying “yes.” "

 

In Nelson a couple of days earlier Page & Blackmore did a wonderful job presenting Rachel Bush in conversation with Bill Manhire to a packed venue, followed by the launch of Nice Pretty Things.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Eleanor Catton to be new writer in residence at the Michael King Writers’ Centre

November 16, 2011 |

 

Congratulations Ellie! The press release from the Michael King Writers’ Centre follows:

 

A rising star of New Zealand fiction writing whose first novel had a big international impact has been awarded a six-month residency in Auckland in 2012.
 
Eleanor Catton’s first novel The Rehearsal was released in New Zealand and the United Kingdom in 2008-09, and translation rights have been sold in 12 languages. It won multiple New Zealand and international awards, including the Amazon.ca Best First Book Award (2011). It was on the longlist for the Orange Prize and for the International Dublin Writer’s Award, and on the shortlist for the Guardian First Book Award and the Dylan Thomas Award.

Eleanor Catton won the 2007 Sunday Star-Times short story competition and then  two fellowships at the prestigious University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop (2008 to 2010). She has appeared at numerous writers’ festivals around the world. She currently holds the Ursula Bethell Residency at the University of Canterbury.
 
Eleanor has been awarded the six-month University of Auckland residency at the Michael King Writers’ Centre, which runs from July 2012. She plans to work on a quartet of novels for young adults, which will read as “fantastical thrillers”. They will be based on the seventeenth century Enlightenment, conceiving that period in Western history as the death of magic and the beginning of a new world order, a transition from a feudal worldview into a more democratic one.

The residency is a partnership among The University of Auckland, Creative New Zealand and the Michael King Writers’ Centre. It aims to foster New Zealand writing by providing an opportunity for an author to work full-time on a major project in an academic environment. The residency comes with a $30,000 stipend, together with free accommodation and a studio working space at the Michael King Writers’ Centre in Devonport, Auckland.
 
The Michael King Writers’ Centre will host three more residencies, each of eight weeks, next year. An announcement about these residencies will be made soon.

 

Scrim: The Man with a Mike

November 08, 2011 | A launch speech by ELIZABETH ALLEY

 

Bill Renwick's new book - Scrim: the man with a mike was launched last week at Unity Books by the inimitable Elizabeth Alley who has kindly agreed to share her launch speech with us below:

 

There are several reasons why I'm happy to be here to perform the pleasurable task of setting this book on its way.

 

• For a start, Bill gently reminded me that we'd known each other for 40 years – and as we get older it seems like a good idea to acknowledge loyal and durable friendships for which I am grateful

 

• then – the launching of his book also gives us all the opportunity to acknowledge and celebrate Bill's scholarship, skill and his huge contribution to NZ life and letters.

 

• The book also represents a closure for a project that goes back to around 2002 and emerges from a context that was by no means straightforward, and whose conclusion is due solely to Bill's determination and fortitude.

 

• And as a former broadcaster for whom the somewhat ghostly presence of Scrim –( I'm glad to say I was too young and/or too lowly to have known him personally) – was as a broadcasting pioneer I always thought of as slightly odd, idiosyncratic and crusty – and in fact I still think he was odd idiosyncratic and crusty- but Bill's much more complete and insightful picture fills in a lot of gaps which allow a more generous view of him.

 

Some background to this book, is necessary. It happened under the auspices of a short lived but effective body called the Broadcasting History Trust. This came into being thanks to a stroke of genius by Hugh Rennie, who was at that time , in the early 1990's, the chairman of the Broadcasting Corporation of NZ and who presided over the dissolution of that body when it was split into separate commercial and national entities. Hugh, with the kind of insight for which he's known, decided that it was a great shame to hand back any residual money to the consolidated fund, and that if relevant use could be made of these funds, then it should be possible to retain them for a valid purpose. The Broadcasting History Trust was the result, and over the next decade it supported and funded some excellent publications that ensured the history of NZ broadcasting was well documented in a scholarly and authoritative way. The intention of the Trust was to remain in existence only as long as the funding held out. In 2002, it was pretty well depleted, some excellent books having been the result, all published by Auckland University Press, as well as some monographs. There were some residual funds which, the Trust decided, should go towards the writing of the life of the man who was the first head of Commercial broadcasting and who had made his name as a kind of radio evangelist – Colin Scrimgeour. As was the custom the project was tendered, but the Trust felt that Bill Renwick was our man for the job and was delighted when he took up challenge. Sadly before he had progressed very far some health problems intervened, and all the materials and the funds were deposited with the Turnbull Library to join other Scrim papers. We always hoped that another scholar would want to pick up the project, but to our delight, Bill himself, restored to health, was able to pick up the project again about 18 months late. This book is the result.

 

Over the years of its writing, my strong impression has been that the project has been anything but straight forward. To start with, we have a subject who was an enigmatic, vain, determined crusader who left school at 11; was interested in Tolstoyan philosophy, boxing, farming, - a man who worked in a travelling circus, was a sharp shooter, worked on the Napier-Gisborne railway, managed a billiard saloon, who embraced Methodism somewhat accidentally- and who became this country's best known evangelistic radio broadcaster of his time. All, one might think, making him a fascinating candidate for a history or biography, as indeed he was. Be that as it may, in fact, the personal details of his life are scant and sketchy. For instance in his own autobiographical notes he fails to mention his first marriage or much about his 3 children and in common with so many men of his generation, he seldom managed to express clear feelings or personal opinions about anything other than his work , politics, or his public persona. Many of his notes were based on inaccurate memory, he was extremely hazy about dates, there were opposing accounts of certain incidents, and the dozens of cassette tapes left by him were discursive and frequently inaudible- they were to have comprised an aural autobiography; thank Heavens they didn't. In short, he was an enigma with huge gaps in his life and Bill's task was to find what was accurate, to put flesh on the bones, to discover what lay beneath the surface, to interpret the silences, and to give this difficult subject human shape and energy. As well, Scrim lived in the most interesting of political times. As much as this is a story of a man and his crusade, it is also a fascinating account of our social history, of the politics of the time, and of the pursuit of social activism.

 

We are all familiar with Bill's distinguished career in education and the associated writing that has accompanied it and tonight we are celebrating his skill and his scholarship in a specific way. Thinking about this launch, I was looking over some of the previous Trust publications including the first one, the excellent Life of James Shelley by Ian Carter. Ian remarked here that evidence of Shelley's life was so slight and scattered that he had to work like a detective, "hunting for clues and connecting them in ramshackle structures of argument." But he explains that this is by no means a limitation- that where evidence is light, biography becomes macramé, not bricklaying. I'm not sure about the practical aspects of this analogy but it seems to me that Bill has brought real and special skill to weaving together the disparate pieces to give us a coherent picture of the man who influenced and inspired so many thousands of New Zealanders with his evangelistic and proselytizing presence. Marjorie was heard to utter the immortal words, with more stoicism than their originator, that "there were 3 people in this marriage" and I'm sure she's delighted to have reached the stage where the 3rd person has now been divorced and it's neither her nor Bill! But with this book we at last have a more complete account of Scrim's life and times, and Bill is to be warmly congratulated for it. I thank him for his perseverance and determination in completing it so successfully. I commend the book to you, and in sending it on its way, my hope is that it finds its own Friendly Road.

 

 

Elizabeth Alley October 27th 2011

Launch of Observations: Studies in New Zealand Documentary

October 17, 2011 | A Book by Russell Campbell

 

Observations: Studies in New Zealand Documentary was launched last week at VicBooks by Alister Barry, who has kindly allowed us to reproduce his amusing launch speech below.

 

When Russell asked me if I would launch his new book on documentary making in New Zealand I was quite taken aback. Russell and I have been friends for over 30 years but his work as an academic, writer, script writer, script assessor and advisor, lecturer, adjunct professor and so on has been in a world of far greater intellectual rigour and on a different plain from mine. I am honoured to have been asked to launch Russell’s latest work.

I first got to know Russell without realising it.

In the early 1970s I decided to have a go at making political documentaries and I bought a second hand 16mm Bolex camera for $50.

I thought I should buy a book to find out how to use it.
I bought two books published in America  - Photographic Theory for the Motion Picture Cameraman  and - Practical Motion Picture Photography. I found them very useful. For example I learnt where the phrase “colour temperature” comes from, which is more than most professional cameramen and women I have worked with over the years, know. The different colours of the scale are the colours of steel as it heated, from a yellowish hue through to blue.

Interesting eh?

It wasn’t till years later and long after I met him, that I discovered that both books were compiled and edited by one Russell Campbell.

The first time I met Russell in the flesh was one Saturday morning in 1978 in Sydney St West behind Parliament. Rod Prosser and I had begun making a documentary about a political struggle that was going on inside the Timber workers union in the Bay of Plenty. We had got to a point where we knew the film was a mess and we needed help. Rod told me he had met a guy at a National Film Unit function who had just returned from the US and had studied film at university. Wow, a man with a degree in film and filmmaking!

Rod and I met Russell at his flat that morning and asked if he would help us. Russell analysed the script, such as it was, and identified the problems. From then on the three of us worked as co-directors of the film that we eventually called “Wildcat”. Russell and Rod showed the film in community halls but the film has never been shown on tv and Rod reminded me recently that TVNZ refused to even consider considering whether to screen it. It did get a mention in Parliament at the time.  A National Party cabinet minister Venn Young referred to it as “the sort of rubbish the Arts Council Funds”. 

Soon after we met, Russell invited Rod and me to read his dissertation for his PhD at North Western University. It was about 3 inches thick and was a real revelation to us both. It was about a group of political activists in the US who got together and tried to make politically useful films in the 1930s and 40s. We were amazed that there were so few of these filmmakers even in America, and that they had no money and that they ended up making films in much the same way as we were trying to do here in Wellington. We were not alone! Russell’s thesis was later published as a book called “Cinema Strikes Back: Radical Filmmaking in the US 1930 to 1942”

In 1979 Russell, Rod and I decided to call ourselves Vanguard Films and in the early 1980s we began a documentary about NZ’s military links with the US. It ended up being called “Islands of the Empire”.  At the time we were working on the film Owen Wilkes had discovered some obscure US military documents indicating that there was a spy base in NZ tracking the movements of all vessels in the South Pacific. He thought that the base was probably near Waiuru at the naval communications station there. Russell, Rod and I arrived there on a Saturday afternoon and got our camera out to get some shots of the base and the circular antennae array Owen had told us to look for.

There was no circular antennae array but we took a shot of a building near the aerials anyway.  There was no one around, so we walked down the long driveway towards a large windowless building stopping every 100 meters or so, to repeat the shots, and waiting to get sprung. At the fourth stop we got a huge fright. A stern voice close by spoke to us.
 “Stop. Who are you? Don’t move. Wait where you are.” 
The voice was coming from a small box on the top of a post beside the road. We stopped.  A minute or two later a Land rover came rocketing down the road behind us. Out jumped a man in cricket whites demanding to know who we were and what we were doing. We had interrupted a cricket match, and here was the base commander, aka cricket captain. After a while he calmed down and let us depart without confiscating the camera or, surprisingly, our film. A few weeks later after some sleuthing, Rod and I found the actual spybase and got some good shots after creeping through the sandhills at Tangimoana.

The 1981 Springbok tour offered plenty of opportunity for confrontation between Vanguard Films and authority.  As it turned out it was Russell who had to deal with the toughest encounter on his own. He was at our studio in Kate Sheppard Place one afternoon and answered the door to a plainclothes cop who demanded to be let in. Perhaps the cop was small and Russell was big and quick, but Russell managed to get the door closed and told the cop he wasn’t coming in without a search warrant. Russell rang Hugh Rennie, our lawyer, who came down in time for the return of the cops and, as it turned out, SIS officers, or perhaps police intelligence. They had a warrant to search the premises for “bombs or bomb making material and equipment”.  The SIS guys spent a good while going though our desk dairy and address books while the cops wandered about looking for bombs in a half hearted way. After the SIS guys had finished they all left. We never heard from them again.

In the decades since, Russell has been writing and teaching and continuing to make films. He has always taken his work incredibly seriously, always working to improve the quality and intellectual depth of our film culture. I think Russell’s latest book will be even more useful than his first, second and third books.  Thanks to this book, documentary makers like me can now see where we fit and where we might best try to contribute to our developing culture. With this guide to what has gone before, we can now see more clearly how to lift our game with better ideas, scripts and edits. And for or all of us, filmmakers or not, Russell’s observations on the way others have looked at our culture and history give us a broader and clearer over-view.

 

In the chapter on documentaries about artists he writes,
   “A culture has been created that wasn’t there before, a culture which makes us aware of our national failings as well as our strengths”
This sentence jumped out at me as perfectly describing what this book has done.

 

Alister Barry October 13, 2011

Lives of the Poets wins Best Cover

August 30, 2011 |

VUP are celebrating a well deserved win for Greg Simpson, designer of the excellent cover of Lives of The Poets at the recent PANZ Book Design Awards. Congratulations Greg and John!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

John Newton on Ian Wedde's The Catastrophe

August 29, 2011 | From the launch of The Catastrophe

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ian Wedde has been an inspiration to me for almost as long as I can remember.  When I went to Sydney as a teenager in 1978 I took with me just a couple of totemic NZ books,  one of which was Ian’s most recent at the time, Spells for Coming Out, his wonderful volume of poems from 1977.  I read that volume over and over, and ever since that time, Ian – perhaps more than anyone else – has represented to me what it might be like to be a New Zealand poet, a New Zealand writer.  He’s a model of how you would do that job seriously, if you were good enough.
                Throughout his career – which is to say forty years, give or take, and what must now be about two dozen books – Ian has maintained relentlessly high standards.  And I’m sorry if that sounds head-masterish, but it’s true.  I don’t mean it just in an aesthetic sense, obviously, though that is definitely part of it.  Ian frets about the aesthetic as a category, but I don’t think he ever denigrates it, or if he does it’s always in the course of a dialogue in which the aesthetic (‘beauty’, ‘pleasure’) gets a chance to speak back.  Pleasure has always been a powerful motivator in Ian’s work.  Actually, there’s a more powerful term which is JOY (somewhere he calls it that ‘mature emotion’).  He’s always been a joyous writer – even when what he’s writing about the difficulty of maintaining that.   And you’ll find that this ‘hedonic’ dimension is well and truly evident in The Catastrophe– more so, it may be, than in any other novel he’s written.  The main character Christopher Hare is food writer and food lover, after all.  But I’m also talking of course about the way it’s written (I’ll come back to this).
                First, though, I want to talk about those ‘standards’ that I said Ian has maintained.  The kind of bar that he’s set for himself, if you like.  Now that is an aesthetic thing, but more than that, I think, it’s an intellectual thing, a political, an ethical thing.  There’s a high degree of formal awareness in Ian’s writing, obviously, but he’s not someone who ever writes just for the sake of it.  He never writes ‘exercises’ – or he certainly doesn’t publish them.  He’s always writing about something, and that something is always political.  Moreover – and I think this might almost be the cardinal virtue of Ian’s writing for me – he never writes the same book twice.  In 40 years he’s never done that.  There’s a line from a poem in Castaly – my books are all packed to shift to Auckland and I’m embarrassed to say I can’t even remember the title of it – but in this poem the poet-figure is giving himself a bit of a telling off (as quite often happens in that book) and he says (if I remember correctly): ‘Here you are, tap-dancing on your modest accomplishment.’  It’s just the kind of thing that Ian would accuse himself of, but it’s precisely the kind of thing that he would never actually do.  There was one time I think when he began to sense that happening to him (when he thought was beginning to repeat himself) but his response, typically, was to stop publishing for 8 or 10 years and go and find something else that needed doing (at Te Papa). 
                So there’s restlessness in Ian’s writing which I think is absolutely fundamental to its politics.  He never marks time.  He’s always pushing on, and outwards, feeling for those places, in cultural politics, and in brute politics, where the tectonic plates are grinding up against one another and the big problems are being litigated.  He’s a topical writer, if you like, but in a much stronger sense than we usually apply to that term.  It’s not about trend-spotting.  It’s about what Ian calls ALERTNESS.   (What other people might call awareness; or historical-mindedness.)
                I could talk here about his big 80s novel Symmes Hole and what makes that such a landmark text.  I could about Te Papa.  I could talk about the Penguin Book of NZ Verse that he edited in 1985.
                But instead I’m here to talk about this wonderful new novel The Catastrophe.  The title refers to the way Christopher Hare’s wife thinks of their marriage.  But the phrase also translates the Arabic al-Nakba, which how the Palestinian people refer to 1948 and the declaration of the state Israel, and the expulsion of the Palestinians to Lebanon, Jordan, Syria.  And it’s that crossover, between a rather frothy private world and a very grave political world, that’s at the heart of this novel.
                In the opening sequence – and I  can tell you this I think because it all happens in the first 5 pages – Christopher is eating in a restaurant in Nice when a white taxi pulls up and a woman gets out, walks into the restaurant and shoots two other diners.  And for reasons that are not all clear to himself – but they have something to do with the Catastrophe of his own career, and something to do with the woman’s self-possession and conviction and the beauty that this somehow confers on her, I think – the food writer leaps to his feet and throws himself into the getaway car, the white taxi.  He kidnaps himself, as someone puts it later.  And then the action unfolds over the next 12 hours or so as Christopher is held hostage by this small Palestinian assassination squad, which is what it turns out to be.
                And in the course of this 12 hours – overnight – the novels winds together, or unwinds together, both the story of Christopher’s hedonistic career (and don’t forget, of course, he’s a writer) and his allegedly ‘catastrophic’ marriage, AND the modern history of Palestine.  So you see what I mean about those tectonic plates grinding together.  Because of course that crossing or identification or transference that Christopher undergoes – between his world and the Arab world – is pretty much the fundamental crossing point of our historical moment, isn’t it? 
                What I want to stress about this, however, is that you don’t write a convincing novel about Palestine and the West by waking up one day and saying ‘hey, that’s a topical idea’ and getting on Wikipedia.  The reason Ian can do it now is because he’s always been alert to that politics, which is how he came to be living with the Palestinians in Jordan as a young man in his early twenties.  So it’s a novel very much of this moment – post 9/11, even the so-called Arab spring – but I think it’s also a novel that Ian has been gestating for about 40 years.  And his understanding of Palestinian history really does have that kind of weight to it.  What he’s managed to write here is a novel that I think will stand up in any company in terms of the crossing of the Western imagination into the Arab East.  If I had to name a comparison I’d have to go for something like Tony Kushner’s amazing play about Afghanistan, Homebody/Kabul.  Ian’s understanding of this history has the same kind of depth.
                What I haven’t told you yet – really I’m saving the main point till last – is what a great read The Catastrophe is.  I’ve said that Ian’s always on the move – he doesn’t repeat himself, he doesn’t ‘tap-dance’  – so that when you open a new Wedde novel  you never know quite what he’s going to be up to.  His previous five novels (if I’m counting correctly) cover a huge amount of ground in formal and stylistic terms.  I won’t try to put a genre label on this novel, beyond saying I guess that it’s a kind of thriller, but what he seems to have gone for more than ever before, I think, is plot.  Symmes Hole is a wonderful novel which, the first time I read it, must have taken me about a fortnight to get through.  The Catastrophe is also a wonderful novel, but I read this one in two sittings.  It’s by far the most streamlined novel that Ian’s written.  It’s only 190 pages.  And I promise you, you’ll read it fast.  You’ll do it in the time it takes to braise a big pot of joues de boeuf.  (Which is just to say, I haven’t talked about the food aspect – you’ll discover that for yourselves. Don’t read it while you’re hungry.)
                Okay, so, you’ll read it fast.  But then, when you’re finished, if you enjoy it as much as I have, you’ll probably want to turn back and read it again slowly.  Like many writers, I’m sure Ian is exercised by the tension between wanting to write readable, plot-driven fiction, on the one hand, and on the other to write something that is difficult and thoughtful and demanding and puts up resistance; something you can get your intellectual teeth into.   But it seems to me here that he’s done a remarkably successful job of laminating those two things together.  There’s a fast novel, the one you’ll read first, for the plot and the food and just to know what happens.    And then wrapped up inside it there’s a much slower novel (a slow-cooker) that you’ll read for the politics and the history and the complicated characters.
                It’s too early, of course, and who am I to say, but just between you and me I reckon this could be Ian’s best novel.    But don’t take my word for it.  Buy it, read it.  Read it again.

 

I loved you the moment I saw you

August 24, 2011 | Photos by Peter Black, essay by Ian Wedde

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Peter Black's new book of stunning colour photographs was launched last week, this is one of the images from the book. Wellingtonians will recognise many of the places and faces but at the same time this really could be the story of any city. Also in the book is an essay by Ian Wedde, the following is a short extract.

 

Since I moved to Wellington in 1975, almost everything I’ve written has had a template of one kind or another in this place – the houses I’ve lived in, the well-worn yet recursively habitual tracks around town, to the post office, through Courtenay Place, Unity Books, the Vietnamese noodle shop on Vivian Street, around Oriental Bay, Moore Wilson’s produce, Regional Wines by the Basin Reserve, and so on – routes that are also neural networks or rhizomatic thought-tracks so familiar on a daily basis that I could pretty much walk them at random with my eyes shut. Which, in a sense, I do, as often as not – like anyone else. That partial sightlessness becomes the default state of the habitual urban nomad, the introspective flâneur, walking around as if blind to everything but the thoughts or tasks or wishes that occupy the idling mind and are projected there on a screen whose reflexive surface is half turned away from the familiar world outside; or half blind and deaf to anything but the inner narrative that mutters and blinks there in the mind, where language and image are shiftily overriding each other – marking time until I get back to the room I work in, where a familiar disposition of bookshelves, the askance view down across the garden to the neighbour’s back yard (which I don’t see, because I’m looking at and listening to something mental in between typing) are what fix me in the place of imagination. That this place of imagination is also situated has to be relearned or acknowledged anew from time to time; or I have to be startled into that acknowledgement somehow.

 

We have a limited quantity signed copies of I loved you the moment I saw you available for purchase from our webstore now.

 

Ian Wedde New Zealand Poet Laureate 2011-2013

August 04, 2011 |

We're thrilled that VUP author Ian Wedde has been named New Zealand Poet Laureate 2011-2013.

 

 

New Zealand’s new Poet Laureate for 2011-2013 is Ian Wedde, the Minister responsible for the National Library Nathan Guy has announced today.

“The Poet Laureate is a prestigious position, acting as an Ambassador for the role of poetry as part of our national culture,” says Mr Guy.

“This position is administered by the National Library and is a recognition by the government of how important poetry is to our history, culture and identity.

“Mr Wedde has had a distinguished career in the arts and is well qualified to take on this important role.”

His publications include fourteen collections of poetry, six novels, two collections of essays, a monograph on the artist Bill Culbert, several art catalogues, and numerous contributions to other books.

Ian Wedde has received National Book Awards for fiction and poetry, an Arts Foundation Laureate award, a Distinguished Alumni Award at the University of Auckland, the Landfall Essay prize and was created an officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit in the Queen’s Birthday Honours.

The New Zealand Poet Laureate receives $80,000 over the two-year period of their tenure. They are supported by the National Library to define the role in their own individual way, while fulfilling the responsibilities of the office.

They are expected to produce a publication of the work written during their period as Laureate and to publicly advocate for and present poetry.

Previous Laureates have included Bill Manhire, Hone Tuwhare, Elizabeth Smither, Brian Turner, Jenny Bornholdt and Michele Leggott. The outgoing Poet Laureate is Bluff poet Cilla McQueen.

The National Library maintains a website for the Poet Laureate:http://nzpoetlaureate.natlib.govt.nz

 

 

The Snake-Haired Muse launched

August 02, 2011 | A Speech by Vincent O'Sullivan

 

 

Let me begin with a pretty obvious fact. There is no other book on any New Zealand  poet that has the depth, or the scholarship, or the clarity, of Geoff’s and John’s and Paul’s account of classical myth and Baxter. And let me follow this with what may be less obvious, but of equal importance. This book is also what you might call a significant piece of reclamation, a blast against an egregiously provincial kind of political correctness, as it restores an insistent vein of pakeha whakapapa.

So a little more on that. As the authors politely point out, there was a time soon after his death when it became almost a fashion to put the boot into Baxter, and especially for his so extensively drawing on classical myth. It was regarded by some as deeply un-New Zealand, very un-up-with-the-play. It was so uncontemporary, too insistently solemn, to be so at ease with figures and patterns that had been central to literature for several thousand years. It was decidedly uncool to come on so old-hat educated; to write, for God’s sake, as if one were a European! An immediate awkwardness for this argument of course was that no poet before Baxter had worked so extensively the grain of ordinary New Zealand experience, or so caught the country’s physical presence or the tang of its language, or had so faced up to what a botched outfit we were in so many respects. What so often allowed him to do this so convincingly, and give it such resonance, was his alertness to just how precisely the configurations of myth fitted the details of lived experience.

As Baxter thought and as Nietzsche said, ‘metaphor is the desire to be somewhere else’, the push of something which at first seems so strikingly individual, towards what becomes so convincingly communal, that space where, as Jung put it, ‘Myths give us pictures for our emotions’. Baxter’s very staginess, you could say, was at the core of the man who made sense to himself only by running his personal freight along mythic rails. Private experience only had value for Baxter when it found a parallel in myth, a part of the timeless pattern where he might insinuate himself. As the 1890s poet Lionel Johnson, whose penchant for heavy drinking, whose conversion to Catholicism, ands whose ease with the classics gives him much in common with Baxter, used to insist, ‘Life is nothing if not performance.’ When this moved outside poetry into a repertoire of various Baxterian’turns’ it inevitably attracted acolytes as it also provoked fury, neither of which has much to do with an assessment of the poems

But I return for a moment to what I earlier touched on – the curious paradox that while our litterateurs so eagerly and understandably endorse the traces of tradition and myth and tribal memory in Maori and Polynesian writers, there could be a distinct sense of embarrassment when faced with a pakeha equivalent. This relates I think to what one might think of as the Fantasy of the Settler Blowdryer, the assumption that whatever our cultural genepool carries with it dessicates when we or our forbears decide to live here. As if Burns or Blake are not as authentically figures in our whakapapa as they are for a poet in Liverpool; as if Persephone or Herakles are not as rightfully accessible to a New Zealand poet, if he chooses them to be, as they are for a poet in Moscow or Prague.

That is the underlying argument of this handsome book, with its witty Marion McGuire images. ‘Give a man a mask,’ as Wilde famously said, ‘and he will tell you the truth about himself.’ If the fashion for poetry for a time after Baxter insisted that masks no longer mattered because the mask currently in favour didn’t look like one, then that’s OK. You don’t have to admire Baxter, and there are a number of reasons why you may not. But you cannot read him without conceding the sophistication  and  range and originality of what he does, or his remarkable authority and ease among the most enduring figures in Western poetic practice.

Getting on for forty years after his death, I think we readers are fortunate that three Victoria scholars, with their impressive pooling of skills, have now given us this book. They tell us who has written the various chapters, yet the narrative is seamless. Their shared knowledge of the vast corpus of Baxter’s texts, and the classical texts behind them, is encyclopaedic. As with Baxter himself, they see not the slightest dislocation, nor the slightest hint of an un-New Zealand activity, in talking about, say, Holyoake and Pluto in the same sentence. As a work of understanding and unravelling, there is nothing quite to touch this volume in dealing with our poetry. And finally, how appropriate, and mildly ironic, that it comes from the university where not even Ian Gordon could excite Baxter with Anglo-Saxon, and which the student poet referred to as ‘Bullshit Castle’. The Snake-Haired Muse is essential and invaluable. Geoff and John and Paul may very well be proud of it, and Victoria proud of them.
Long may its serpents writhe.

 

Vincent O'Sullivan

28/07/2011

Read more on The Snake-Haired Muse or purchase.

 

 

From the mountains to the surgeon’s table

 

July 29, 2011 |

The University of Otago will confer the honorary degree of Doctor of Literature on leading New Zealand poet and writer Brian Turner at a graduation ceremony next month.

Vice-Chancellor Professor David Skegg says that Mr Turner is one of the country's most gifted poets, whose work has not only met with critical acclaim but also attracted a large popular following.

'I am delighted that the University is able to celebrate Brian Turner's outstanding poetic achievements and his other extensive contributions to New Zealand life and letters' Professor Skegg says.

Brian Turner has written and published a lot of non-fiction that looks at politics, sport and recreation, environmentalism in New Zealand. What we do here, and why. He says he’s ‘always been fascinated by what is going on in what many term the 'natural world' around us - in a sense of the numinous in the lands that shape us. Lawrence Durrell once said that he thought the hills and the mountains were watching us, and were asking us if we were watching ourselves in them.’ However Brian’s poems of the last year have taken an even more personal turn. He talks about that here:

 

My new collection of poems, Inside Outside, includes a long sequence called 'Post-Operatives'.

I've spent a large amount of time in hospitals, have lost count of the number of operations I've had. But I do know that between 2000 and 2010 I had five operations involving 12-14 hours on the table, and I can remember 11 operations in all in the past 30 years - and there were some before that dating back to the 1950s. Then there are the dozens of often highly unpleasant and painful other medical interventions, procedures and tests that I've undergone. Doctors have sometimes said to me, 'Oh, you again.'

Early in 2010 I underwent a 4 hour operation after being diagnosed with something nasty. I thought maybe I wouldn't be alive much longer - and if it wasn't for the skills of surgeons and other medics over the years I wouldn't be here today. All that knocks one around both physically and mentally. One surgeon said to me, kindly, chuckling, that it was as if I'd been built out of pieces of a Mechano set.

In the ensuing months in 2010 I wrote scores of poems, reflections on life and loves past and present. I was desolate, felt bashed around, close to giving up. I was scared. Was barely hanging on, more distressed than I could ever remember. One result was scores of raw, candid, frank and often stripped down poems which explore three of the themes that have been constants in my work from the beginning: love, longing and loss. The sorts of things one might call landscapes of the heart and soul.

One takes risks going there. At no time in my life have I felt that I would make old bones. Which means one lives with a sense of fear and foreboding. But I like to think that for the most part I've been a realist more than a sentimentalist all through. That said, I also think that the closer you get to sentiment without becoming sentimental the more affecting and powerful poetry is.

Brian Turner 18/06/11

Kate Camp & Pip Adam win at the Posties

June 28, 2011 |

 

We're thrilled to congratulate Kate Camp on last night's win at the New Zealand Post Book Awards - Best book of Poetry for The Mirror of Simple Annihilated Souls.

 

Fergus Barrow says - "I first heard some of the key poems in a reading, and I was stunned at their emotional intensity, and impressed that that had been achieved without any cost to the verbal wit and sometimes ribald humour that have been the hallmarks of Kate's poetry. When I read the manuscript I knew it was the breakthrough book that would establish her as one of New Zealand's major poets. I am thrilled for Kate that that has been recognised by this award."

 

Described by judge Michael Harlow as a truly thoughtful and engaging book of poems, Harlow says, ‘In ‘The Mırror Of Simple Annihilated Souls, Kate Camp has rather courageously accepted the challenge to make words sing to that universal and always fascinating experience: what is it that love desires the self to do, and be — in the service of what we can recognise as ‘soul-making. Camp demonstrates a poetic brilliance of her own by making ‘original translations’ of her own in a contemporary idiom that deals with the spiritual dimension of life-lived-in-the world’.

Pip Adam, as earlier announced, picked up the award for Best First Book of Fiction for her short stories Everything We Hoped For. Fergus says of Pip's work: "Some readers have commented that Pip's stories are very dark, grim even, but I don't really get that; I find their unsparing focus and refusal of the easy writer's refuges of caricature and moralising to be energising. I might be weird, but they cheer me up, and I'm delighted by this confirmation that there are other readers who feel the same way."

 

 

 

 

Also short listed was Tim Wilson for Their Faces Were Shining. Their Faces Were Shining is a singular book, and there is very little else in New Zealand literature to compare to it for the audacity of the idea and the combination of pacy storytelling and serious purpose. It is Tim's first novel, but it is hard for me to think of him as a new writer because I have been reading and publishing his stories since the 1990s, so I know how hard he has worked to get this good.

Thanks to NZ Post for supporting the awards and the lovely team at Booksellers NZ for their hard work putting it all together.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Words for Vincent - an introduction by Harry Ricketts

July 19, 2011 | From a recent event at Marsden Books, Karori

 

It’s a great pleasure, and honour, to be asked to say a few words about Vincent O’Sullivan’s latest collection of poems, The movie may be slightly different - before Vincent gives us a reading from it. To be asked to do this is also, I need hardly say, a source of considerable panic. Vincent is such a commanding presence not just in New Zealand poetry but in New Zealand literature at large: novels, plays, short stories, critical and personal essays, anthologies, the biography of Mulgan, the editing of Mansfield’s letters. Wherever you look, Vincent has left his indelible mark, something for us to be hugely grateful for. His poetry ‒ and particularly the collections of the last decade or so ‒ has been highly, widely and justly praised. It constitutes a remarkable body of work, as the English poet and translator Michael Hulse said of Blame Vermeer in New Zealand Books:
Blame Vermeer is the real thing, wise beyond the attitudes of wisdom, deft beyond the posturing of deftness, brimming with O’Sullivan’s exciting ability simply to talk his understated way into sheer bloody poetry.

All of which is equally true of The movie may be slightly different, which is full of memorable talk, of “sheer bloody poetry”. But here are a few of the many things I particularly enjoy about the new collection, and which I hope you will too. So I like the fact that, as in Vincent’s earlier collections, you find yourself hanging out with such an unlikely polyglot of good poetic company: Baxter, Brasch, Brecht, Cavafy, Curnow, Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore, Rilke, Seferis, Wallace Stevens, among others. What an assortment! And because what has struck Vincent about these writers is always something unexpected, you have, in addition to the pleasure of his poem, the bonus of going back to the other poet’s work with a quickened interest. So ‘On the same road you can’t help thinking’ is in itself a powerful, idiosyncratic meditation on Baxter and religious faith, but also sends you back with a sharpened bafflement to Baxter’s poems and what Vincent memorably dubs their “scalding honey”.

Sometimes these poems contain useful hints as to how to read - and how not to read – poetry, in particular Vincent’s own. So, the footnote to ‘Suppose, for the moment’, a poem which sparks off Emily Dickinson, briskly comments that Dickinson herself “wrote 1800 poems, usually mistaken as ‘personal’” ‒ with ‘personal’ in inverted commas.

‘Suppose, for the moment’: what a characteristic O’Sullivan title! So too is the insouciant ‘The critic explains it all’. This poem beautifully suggests by ironic inversion what poetry – despite the critic’s assertions - might actually be. Here’s the beginning – I love the sudden tonal pressure on the word ‘just’. The critic is speaking:
“The last thing I’d want poetry just to be
is a man thinking intelligently about the state
of life, the mystery of the whole caboodle,
the great trail of moonlight that excites us
when it’s laid across a summer harbour ….”
Vincent’s poetry does indeed constantly “think[] intelligently about the state of life”, “the mystery of the whole caboodle” – and seriously too, but never, thank goodness, earnestly. After the critic has gone on with more clever pronouncements, this particular poem concludes in a typically O’Sullivanesque shift of register: “Thank Christ it’s about then the house burns down.” As an otiose reviewer of a hundred years ago would no doubt have remarked, “Wit and irony are seldom strangers to O’Sullivan’s poems.” And if you like your satire strongly spiced, you may soon find yourself turning to poems like ‘The panel meets for lunch’, ‘Defending the Groves’ (the groves of academe, that is), ‘Plane People’ (about a poetry reading from hell), and the terrific ‘Over and out’ in which Cain after being acquitted of murdering Abel goes into advertising.

Other poems show such a relish for life, for the beauty of the natural world, for “the great trail of moonlight that excites us”. ‘Politics for the unborn’, for instance, lists a marvellous catalogue of daily pleasures awaiting the unborn (perhaps a grandchild?), reflecting that “there’s so much you can do the clock/pants to keep up”, before the final line delivers a wryly qualifying nod back to the title: “Just we need to get that across. It’s quite a job.” Then there’s the affectionate companionship of ‘Evening with Friends’, with its quiet tipping of rhyme and off-rhyme – the collection also contains several excellent fully rhymed poems:
Four friends in a pulsing room
till the embers gash, hush
to rimmed ash. An owl
whirrups from above the bush-line.
No-one needs to speak.
There are some excellent dog poems, featuring Norman, Vincent’s and Helen’s German Schnauzer. Along with Norman we are taken for a series of walks ‒ except of course being O’Sullivan poems these quickly slip the leash and take off in unexpected directions. ‘The narrative drive’, for instance, turns into a marvellously oblique, quasi-Jamesian exchange with another early morning stroller in a playground. Thomas Hardy’s late poems are full of potted short stories, swift character sketches, exchanges, dramatic monologues, and so are Vincent’s. There are also some almost-elegies like the all too uncomfortably apt ‘One of these mournings, Old St Paul’s’, which opens:
A woman I never much liked is not the same
woman I now sit a dozen yards from, in the church
where agnostics are sent from ….
By contrast, there are lyrically tender poems, like the final one, the imagistic ‘from Seferis’:
In a small garden – they don’t
come much smaller – light strikes
two red carnations, as it strikes
a sliver of honeysuckle, a single olive.

Light is where you are.
I particularly admire that slight double-take in the last line: not, I think, “Light is where you are” (where ‘you’ could be reader, speaker or both), but “Light is where you are”, making it a tender love poem.
However varied these new poems are in subject matter, range, viewpoint, sympathy – and there is a huge variety, two elements seem to me to hold them together or at least to stamp them as vintage O’Sullivan. One is the apparently effortless control of the often highly intricate syntax. Embarking on a poem here can be like launching out on an exhilarating, high-speed, precarious ski run of the mind as you suddenly find that without halting the sentence has skipped, bumped, twisted, even seemingly stumbled, before miraculously righting itself and releasing you. For instance, the last 25 lines of ‘On the same road you can’t help thinking’, the poem about Baxter, comprise a single sentence – all 145 words of it. It is this mastery of syntax, together with tone, which gives the inimitable, but instantly recognisable tang to the voice of these terrific poems. Here are some openings to savour: “I dislike statements about poets saving the world”; “There’s a man in town trying to sell a harbour”; “She was good, she said, ‘at placing men’”; “I’ve been reading about lepers – the famous/ones”; ”’A place for the genuine’, said Marianne”; “The morose barman leans towards you”; and a particular favourite “The suckfish of the North Island survive”.

But that’s just the smallest taste. Here are 119 new poems from Vincent O’Sullivan. That’s like a double collection. It’s simply not fair. But what a treat.

 

 

Harry Ricketts at Marsden Books, 13/07/2011

FEAR AND OTHER SURPRISES: ON WRITING A POEM EVERY DAY

July 14, 2011 | by Joan Fleming

 

A friend emailed me in June to say, What are you doing in July? Will you be near a computer? Would you like to write a poem every day? Even on weekends? And would you like to put the poem online, where everyone can see it, every day, even on weekends? And are you crazy? Yes, I said. That sounds sufficiently scary to be worthwhile. I’ll do it.

The thing about writing a poem every day is that you have to write something whether you feel like it or not. My usual writing routine is not to get out of bed in the mornings. I like to stay in my pyjamas and bring all my books and notepads and laptop into the bed with me. There’s something about this trick that seems to keep the day out. It says to the day, You can’t have me yet. I’m not even up. See, I’m still in my pyjamas!

My mind is also cleanest in the mornings. There’s not a lot of clutter and tasks and to-do lists. However, this month, I can’t always write in the mornings. Some mornings I have to get up and go to work. So I end up writing my poem-of-the-day at the end of the day, when my head is messy. Some of these end-of-day poems turn out to be rather silly and foolish. And they rhyme. One poem I wrote this week is called, 'Poem about three shoes', and it goes like this: “I have black shoes/and brown shoes/but yellow shoes/are the nowhere/to be found/shoes.//Oh sunny toes/ Oh sunny heels/I will cobble my own pair/from banana peels.” I feel sure I would never write something like this in the morning. When my sister read this little ditty, she said: “You are channeling Dr Seuss!” And maybe she is right. Hopefully she is right. I mean, really, that is a marvellous compliment.

The other writers and artists who are part of this project – it’s called CollaboratElaborate – are doing all sorts of interesting and different things. One contributor is posting beautifully drawn plans and diagrams for his Connecticut permaculture project. A phrase from his post on Bamboo as Wind-breaks found it’s way into one of my poems as: “My mother’s drawing of me is a scribble – wind currents in confusion instead of a face.” The title of another contributor’s poem turned into a line about my father: “He is listening for the noise of the world –it’s anticlines, it’s cataclastic load.” I was surprised that these pieces of other people’s pieces felt so welcome in my own, but hey, I was pleased I could offer them a second home.

The best thing about CollaboratElaborate is that I am learning to get over myself a little bit. I can’t “sit on” poems, or let them mature (or ferment), or spend weeks rearranging five words in the last line. I can’t write lots and only keep the “good” ones – they all have to go out into the world. It’s a good exercise in tempering my over-developed capacity for self-criticism. And since today is only the 14th of July, that means I have 17 more poems to go. Stay tuned.

Joan Fleming gained an MA with Distinction in Creative Writing at Victoria in 2007, and won the Biggs Poetry Prize for that year. Her work has been published in Sport, Landfall, Hue & Cry, The Listener, Takahe, The Best of Best New Zealand Poems, Snorkel, JAAM, Turbine, Blackmail Press and The Lumiere Reader. A clutch of her prose-poems was published as Two Dreams in Which Things are Taken in the DUETS chapbook series in 2010 – a series which pairs one New Zealand and one American poet. Joan lives between Wellington and Golden Bay, and works as a tutor in creative writing and English. Her first collection of poetry, The Same as Yes, will be published in November by VUP.

 

An interview with Greg Simpson, book designer

July 05, 2011 |

Congratulations on being shortlisted for the PANZ Book Design Awards. Can you tell us a little about how you came up with the design of Lives of the Poets?
Well before I’d read any of the poetry, Fergus had mentioned the book covers of Faber and Faber designer Berthold Wolpe. To be honest, I wasn’t familiar with Wolpe but having done some research and after reading some of John Newtons work, I found that Wolpe’s style seemed to have a certain heft that I found in Lives of the Poets. The poems have quite a visceral quality and seem imbued with the smell of wood, grass and leather. By using Wolpe’s minimal but robust forms and informed by the quality of Newton’s writing I tried to construct the cover from basic elements, to create something new and robust. I wanted it to look well built and sculptural but also to contain some quiet surprises.

So many people think they’d like to be a designer but what is the reality of working in the industry like?
Every job is a process of negotiation and compromise. The people you work with, whether they be your clients or workmates are so important. If you can create and maintain good relationships then you’re on the right track.

What other sorts of design do you do?
I’m studying digital interactive design part time, while continuing my freelance work, which usually has me doing some sort of typesetting and production. Recently I designed a catalogue for Hastings City Gallery and I’m currently working with another client, developing some campaign work around the up-coming elections and MMP referendum.

What helps to spark your creative juices? Do you just sit down and work or do you have things to inspire and motivate you? Who are you’re your biggest influences?
I just sit down and work – I’ve got to have coffee to get the ball rolling and music to carry me through. But then I’ll probably drift into a magazine, Twitter, a website …  I’m easily distracted but in a good way I think, these things feed into what I do. I’ve always admired the work of Peter Saville and Mark Farrow, but my influences change a lot ­– it depends on what I’m working on ultimately. At the moment the stakes seem high within the social/political sphere but there is also a lot of hope and I am inspired by the positive thought and work done by colleagues at design school – students and lecturers. That environment is inspiring and I hope I can carry that positivity into my work.

What is your favourite book cover you’ve made for VUP?
Well I enjoyed the first cover I did for VUP – Moonmen by Anna Livesey. There was a certain naivety in my working process, not having designed for poetry before – and this required me to re-evaluate my approach – and I was absorbed by it! Having this work published and to see it on shelves is a thrill – it always is. Lives of the Poets was my second design for VUP so I’m very humbled to have had this nomination.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Greg Simpson

 

 

A word from our chief teabag buyer - Craig Gamble

June 30, 2011 |

Since I started work at VUP about six years ago, not many things I do day to day have changed. I still do all the really important things: talk to Booksellers, pay the bills, help (where I can) get the books to the press and make very sure there is a plentiful supply of teabags.

 

There is one thing that's changed though and that's the ever growing amount of time I spend thinking about, helping produce and trying to sell ebooks. I like to think VUP got into ebooks early in the piece, and we're about to get even more involved. Apart from our ongoing relationship with mebooks and our participation in the Great NZ ebooks project we're also soon to start selling ebooks in the USA via our American distributors IPG. Once the details are sorted there, we should have access to resellers like Apple, Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

 

I can't help but notice though that when it comes to ebooks, there are more than a few myths and misapprehensions, so here are a two I most commonly hear, and why they should be debunked.

 

1. ebooks will make print books redundant: Well, not so much. You may have seen some recent reports about ebooks outselling print books on Amazon. Problem with that is Amazon is notoriously secretive about actual numbers, and didn't take into account all book sales, only paperbacks in this announcement. Implicit in this myth is the idea that digital makes physical redundant, you know, just like in the music industry. But that's a myth too; music companies still sell a huge pile of CD's, even if CD sales continue to fall year on year. In 2010 CD album sales fell by 12.5% to 98.5 million units, and digital sales rose 30.6% to 21 million units, but the digital rise did not make up for the physical slump. It's true that the halcyon days of huge CD sales are over, but it doesn't seem like digital will replace physical, but rather that both will sell in overall smaller numbers. Perhaps there will come a day when physical books will be a rarity, but if the music industry tells us anything, it's that day is a long way off, if it happens at all. It's more likely that both forms will coexist for a long, long time, even if the total market shrinks.

 

2. ebooks will make publishers redundant: Traditional publishing models will be replaced by more authors selling directly to their readers. Look at Pottermore, JK Rowling's new site that sells ebooks direct to readers, look at self published author John Locke recently becoming the second million selling author on Amazon's Kindle ebook platform, surely the end of publishing is nigh. Or not. Yes there will always be some self publishing that is very successful, but there will also always be a lot of dross that is self-published and that sells nothing. There are a lot of authors too who don't have the time, resources or inclination to go it alone even if they are good. Publishers, with their years of experience, still have a huge role to play in discovering and nurturing new talent, not to mention supporting existing writers, and presenting it in its best possible form to the reading public; a public that I think largely know that. It's not about marketing and hype, it's certainly not about greedy publishers taking all the profits. Good publishers will survive, even thrive, by continuing to be good publishers and caring enough about the work they publish to be fussy.

 

 

Craig Gamble is our super helpful administrator and all round good guy. You can follow him on Twitter - @Craig_Gamble.

Barbara Anderson honoured with an Icon award

June 24, 2011 |

 

Barbara Anderson pictured with Damien Wilkins (her first editor at VUP). Photo by Robert Cross

 

VUP are thrilled to congratulate Barbara Anderson, who has been honoured with an Icon award. The Arts Foundation says – Icons are artists whose work represents a legacy to, and a mark on, our culture. They have made a significant impact on their chosen art form. They remain influential and inspirational and continue to be admired for their work. Selected during their lifetime, they are world-class.

 

The Arts Foundation Icon Awards - Whakamana Hiranga, honours senior New Zealand artists for their extraordinary achievements. These artists are recognised as leaders in their fields. The Icon Award is the Arts Foundation's highest honour.

 

Barbara Anderson was born and educated in Hawkes Bay, graduating with a BSc from Otago University in 1947. She then went on to become a medical technologist and teacher in Hawkes Bay and Wellington. A lifelong interest in writing and reading saw her attend the Creative Writing Course at Victoria University.

 

Several of her stories were published in Metro, Landfall, Sport and the New Zealand Listener. Her first book, a collection of short stories, I Think We Should Go into the Jungle was shortlisted for the Wattie Award in 1989 and the New Zealand Book Award for Fiction the year after. As 1991 writing fellow at Victoria University, she completed Portrait of the Artist's Wife, which won the 1992 Wattie Award. The book received critical acclaim in the United Kingdom and the United States. Her novels have been republished on numerous occasions.

 

Barbara is proof that a writer can start late and produce a substantial and original body of work. She started late, but she was always a writer in waiting, and she brought to her work the lifetime experiences of a sharp and worldly observer of communities, workplaces, families and individuals. Hers is a graceful, surefooted prose that seemed fully formed at the start of her career - then kept getting better. She has a remarkable ear for dialogue, and an acute sense of how people represent themselves to themselves, and to others. Hers is an amusing, amused and deeply humane view of human life. And her novels, with their combination of vitality, gaiety and gravity, are unique in our literature. Barbara was awarded an Honorary Degree of Doctor of Literature from the University of Otago in 2009.

 

To quote Nick Hornby in the Sunday Times, "the promise that was evident in Girls High has been splendidly fulfilled, and now it seems only a matter of time before Wellington replaces New York as the literary capital of the world."

 

Irresponsible Reading

June 21, 2011 | by Ian Wedde

Last night at dinner the round-the-table conversation passed quickly over the names of various writers and the titles of their books. At one point I found myself nodding that, yes, I did know the book being discussed. It was true, I did, and the book had probably spent time in the bookshelves at our place, getting browned-off by UV and nibbled by silverfish, before going wherever little-read books go, somewhere not far from the solo sock purgatory.
    But then I had to pause over my hasty assent, because the truth was not so straightforward. The truth is that the book being discussed probably belonged in the category of my ‘irresponsible reads’ – one of the many books I’ve read at high speed (I’m a very slow reader), dipping and sampling rather than methodically turning the pages, flicking to the end, and probably never finishing. Swallowing without chewing, as it were, and then getting up from the table in a bad-mannered way and going off somewhere else.
    As a kid I was an obsessive reader and consumed anything that came my way, whether I understood it or not. As often as not, the books I didn’t understand fascinated me as much as those I did, but for different reasons. I liked the sense that what was in front of me on the page was a kind of screen behind which stories and meanings were hidden; I liked these mysterious reads as much as stories that rushed me through a narrative without boring detail.
    Then my eyesight deteriorated rapidly when I was about nine, and (as I found out later) it became clear that I also had a very mild form of dyslexia; the combination of these two factors meant that reading methodically tired me, so that I began to fall asleep or lose concentration. The reading habits I developed were a combination of binge reading followed by exhausted crashes, painfully slow methodical reading in small doses, and ‘irresponsible reads’ which resulted in the random hoarding of fragments whose connections to each other were usually lost, or rewired in promiscuous ways. I still read like this.
    The few books I love and enjoy the most usually fall into the binge category, the ones I get to read when they and I are both trapped and free – on a long plane trip, with my fellow passengers’ faces lit by flickering screens through the night; or on holiday with no deadlines or projects looking over my shoulder, when I can read, and nap, and read some more – William Gaddis’s JR, for example, in which a rubber-tipped pencil flung to the floor in a rage rebounds many pages later and hits the character in the eye – you have to be up for the long, deadpan trajectory of the joke.
    The slow, short-bite reads have probably been the most responsible in terms of how I’ve been trained to think: Donna Haraway’s When Species Meet, whose tremendous intellectual verve demands a fast read, but which I’ve never quite finished reading, even though I’ve got to the end several times; the meticulous detail of Judith Binney’s accounts of Te Urewera, which seem almost without narrative momentum, but hypnotic page by page; the extraordinary sense of immersed observation in Geoff Park’s essays about landscape, texts that read much like the physical experience of going for walks with him and listening to his marvellous, obsessive commentaries. Turning the pages of Geoff’s books is like walking with frequent pauses to look; the tiredness you feel at the end is as much physical as mental.
    And then there are the ‘irresponsible reads’. In fact, there are several kinds of irresponsibles. I love to tear through great thrillers at high speed, a blink ahead of nod-off, reading the centre of the page – anything fast, droll and frugal by Elmore Leonard; or books in which there’s an emotional current that I can’t resist, such as My Dog Tulip by J.R. Ackerley. There are irresponsibles I’ve read irresponsibly because I didn’t have time, or had to get them under my belt for some professional reason, or just wanted to pillage.
    And then there are the irresponsibles that I can’t really be bothered with, or am annoyed by. These mostly display what I uncharitably call the ‘Zadie Smith effect’. This effect kicks in when the author knows far more about the situation or circumstances of a character than they do, and describes in exhaustive, discursive detail what the character cannot (or doesn’t need) to see – or wouldn’t  be aware of, if they were left to be ‘in character’. It happens when the author’s overbearing research falls across the text in a matted web of parenthetical asides and annotations, until I want to tear the page apart with my bare hands just to let some light and room for imagination in. It happens when the point of view of the character, and even their subject pronoun or name, skids all over the page and in and out of the narrative; when the basic questions, ‘Who’s talking? Who’s watching? Who’s listening? And who’s reading?’ just never get answered – may in fact never have been asked.
    Of course I hope my own books won’t get read ‘irresponsibly’ in this last way. But of course they will. And I probably dig myself traps out of my own reading habits. I want to write the kinds of books that readers will binge on. I also want them to beat the contradiction of being simultaneously great fast reads and immensely absorbing slow ones. And I want so much to avoid the traps of ‘the Zadie Smith effect’ that I risk removing much of the narrative sympathy that will help the reader to engage.
    But in the end, just as you are what you eat, so you are what you read; you can’t be what you read without also being how you read; and if that’s true, then it’s also likely to be true that you will write how you read.
    Does this mean (following the logic to its limit) that my books are doomed to have only one ‘responsible’ reader – me? Fortunately not; because when other people read my books they’re not reading the same book as me. They’re reading the book their own reading habits have predisposed them to. And the chances of other readers’ reading habits matching mine are remote enough to guarantee my books their freedom. Whether they end up in the purgatory next to solo socks isn’t up to me.

Ian Wedde

 

 

 

  Ian's new book The Catastrophe will be released in a couple of weeks. You can read the first chapter as a free download here.

 

 

Baxter’s Classical Baggage

July 14, 2011 | an extract from The Snake-Haired Muse: James K Baxter and Classical Myth

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

James K Baxter orates Homer to Odysseus by Marian Maguire

Baxter, myth and the critics

 

In 1960 the literary quarterly Landfall circulated a questionnaire to a number of New Zealand writers. It asked about their economic circumstances: how much do you earn by writing, what outside work do you do, what kinds of state assistance would help you? Most of the respondents reported back in the same matter-of-fact terms. James K. Baxter’s response came from a different universe of discourse. The problems raised by the questionnaire, he suggested,
"are chips off a single granite block, possibly from that remarkable boulder which Sisyphus, streaming with sweat, shoves uphill every day and night in the not-so-imaginary Greek underworld. [. . .] The real problem raised concerns the weight, size, shape, geological or theological formation of this boulder, and what handholds (if any) can be found on its surface."

 

After describing his own hardscrabble literary existence, in which the time and energy for writing must be found by ‘robbery’ from his employers and his family, he concluded that this way of life was nevertheless the necessary condition of his writing:
"If my economic or social or domestic condition were alleviated in such a way that I had more leisure to write, and possibly more stimulus to write, I would be a Sisyphus divided from his boulder. The gritty touch of its huge surfaces, the grinding weight, the black shadow which it casts, are the strongest intimations of reality which I possess, and the source of whatever strength exists in my sporadic literary productions." (‘Writers in New Zealand: A Questionnaire’ 41–42)

In the following year, writing to his friend Bill Oliver (21 Feb 1961; FM 27/1/11) about Bohemia and respectability, Baxter returned to the image of Sisyphus. ‘I think I agree fundamentally with the kind of thing the Boulder is likely to say to Sisyphus,’ he declared, and improvised a Goonish dialogue between them. ‘You bloody great heap of the fossilized dung of a dinosaur!’ curses Sisyphus. ‘Ssh! Ssh!’ responds the boulder primly. ‘You mustn’t swear.’ The dinosaur which excreted Sisyphus’s stone is presumably the same beast which appears in Baxter’s famous description of New Zealand morality: ‘the Calvinist ethos which underlies our determinedly secular culture like the bones of a dinosaur buried in a suburban garden plot’ (‘Notes on the Education of a New Zealand Poet’, MH 125). What Sisyphus is pushing uphill is the Calvinist work ethic, a system of values Baxter loathes but knows he must remain in touch with—shoulder to the rock—if his writing is to remain relevant to the lives of his fellow New Zealanders.

 

 

An extract from The Snake-Haired Muse: James K Baxter and Classical Myth by John Davidson,Geoff Miles and PaulMillar. Due in bookstores next week.

Illuminating the complexity, adventurousness, imaginative energy, and unexpected wit of Baxter's dealings with classical mythology, The Snake-Haired Muse sheds a new light on New Zealand's most iconic poet.

 

A word on Douglas Lilburn from Jack Body

June 09, 2011 | An extract

For us as New Zealanders, Lilburn's musical legacy is immense, not only for the quality of the work, but also for the power of its manifest personality; his Overture: Aotearoa (1940) is heard and played so often that it has become a kind of musical branding for the nation. But what about Lilburn's ideas as expressed in these two lectures? Do they have any relevance for us in the twenty-first century? Do they have any meaning at all for composers currently working here? …

 

I interpret his words as a call to New Zealand composers, indeed to all our creative artists, for creative honesty as a basis for achieving an authenticity of artistic expression.

 

For the composers of today, focused as they are on their own careers, Lilburn's 1946 dream of a shared musical vernacular seems a rather irrelevant concept—it is, after all, the job of music commentators, rather than composers, to discern whether or not there is a 'New Zealand sound'. And yet, as a nation, there are signs that we are learning 'the trick of standing upright here', of recognizing and embracing who we are and where we stand. We hear it in the voices of radio and television broadcasters speaking with accents that are our own, we recognize aspects of ourselves in popular culture, in pop music, in films like Goodbye Pork Pie, Heavenly Creatures, Whale Rider and Boy; we enjoy seeing ourselves caricatured by the likes of Fred Dagg, the Topp Twins and Flight of the Conchords; and we are absorbed by watching our lives reflected in the domestic dramas of television's Shortland Street and, for those of us who can remember, Close to Home.

 

As a people we have gained a self-confidence far beyond that of the New Zealand of 1946 or 1969. But the creative struggles that Lilburn faced are perennial, and his words of advice, encouragement, and also of warning still ring true for the composers and other creative artists working in this country in the twenty-first century.

 

by Jack Body.

 

This is an extract from the afterword of A Search for Tradition & A Search for a Language, these thought-provoking essays by Douglas Lilburn have been published to mark the 10th anniversary of his death. Illustrated with sketches and watercolours by Rita Angus, introductions by JM Thomson, afterword by Jack Body.

 

 

Thoughts on writing from Susan Pearce

June 07, 2011 |

Can a writer alter the type of story she instinctively writes, or the temporal and psychological structure of that story, and produce a new story that is not false, unsuccessfully experimental or try-hard, but has conviction and internal strength?

Here's a story I often find myself writing. In the story's present my protagonist is strongly affected by an event or series of events that's already complete, and usually of some duration and complexity. The effect of the inciting event on my protagonist is inevitably emotional and psychological. Therefore, in order for the reader to properly understand the protagonist's current state of mind, the event needs to be narrated in detail.

Easy to divine that this story's already in danger. When you describe events that occurred prior to the story's now, you automatically create a flashback. Whether you deliver the flashback in one lump or spread it in shorter blips through the story's present moment, your reader always cares most about what's happening now. Regardless of how pressurised or intriguing your flashback is, it's never going to be more than exposition: how the protagonist got here. And in general it's much easier to bore a reader with exposition than with dramatic action.

You might hope that my protagonist's memories of the event and her discomfort with her current condition would provoke her to run naked into the streets or hijack a plane. Nope. She has to think through her feelings until she attains peace of mind. There's not a lot of action in thinking. Your character and story risk being static and unexciting. The legendary writing teacher Frank Conroy is quoted online as having said, 'Try to never have your characters think'.

I've asked myself, If what happened then is so interesting and provocative, why not set the narrative's now at the beginning of the inciting event?

The idea feels alien to me. I'm deeply, unavoidably interested in an individual's mental state, and how she (or he) got there. For me, the drama is her mental condition. The fundamental question is, Will she survive what happened to her? (That's right: to add to the angst, she's often passive.)

To make the story work, I have to demonstrate to the reader how much hangs on her state of mind, and that's where my toughest imaginative work lies. What's at stake in the physical world of her actions and relationships?

Of course, rules like Conroy's are made to be broken. It's not that my instinctive story-type never works. I've made characters think in sufficiently dramatic ways, and have completed a number of stories (and one novel) along those lines that I'm pleased with.

So in attempting different structures and tones, am I giving myself an unnecessarily hard time? And am I only doing it because the story I described above is tricky to pull off? No. I'm doing it because the possibilities of fiction excite me, and I don't want to be limited by my semi-unconscious patterns and preoccupations. And maybe I've had enough of protagonists who sit around thinking.

Can we help what stirs our imaginations? Maybe. Aside from reading and writing as much as possible, I'm consciously shifting my mechanism for seeking out story-worthy drama. As well as my usual practice of picking up intense psychological states and letting them compost, I'm recalling and sifting through everything I see and hear.

It's fun. Maybe I can become deeply, unavoidably interested in what's going on now, as well as what happened before and its aftermath.

 

Susan Pearce is the author of Acts of Love, published by VUP. She also blogs about the books and ideas that get her thinking.

 

 

Pip Adam - Best First Book, NZ Post Book Awards

June 01, 2011 |

VUP are thrilled to announce that Pip Adam has won 'Best first book, fiction' category of the NZ Post Book Awards.

 

Pip gained an MA in Creative Writing with Distinction from Victoria University in 2007. Her work has appeared in Sport, Glottis, Turbine, Lumiere Reader, Hue & Cry, Landfall and Blackmail Press. Her work has also appeared in publications produced in conjunction with two exhibitions at the Wellington City Art Gallery and her reviews have appeared in Metro. She is currently working toward her PhD Creative Writing at Victoria University. Her PhD project explores how engineers describe the built environment. She is using this research to write stories about our relationships with built forms and the structures that hold them up.

 

Her first book - Everything We Hoped For - is an unusually strong first book, distinguished by an exquisitely crafted surface and barely contained emotional force.

 

We asked Pip to reveal a little known fact about herself and Pip replied:

 

"I've always wanted to write a TV sitcom, I was kind of brought up by TV and I always kind of slip into imagining my life as TV (I often think 'Roll Credits' or 'Queue laugh-track') and I've always wanted to write a sitcom with my friends - nothing excites me more than writing collaboratively, that's why I really like the writing I'm doing for an engineering journal at the moment because the writing is really collaborative. But I've never had the balls.

 

A friend reckons what I watch affects my writing - I love Nighty Night and Louis CK and Sarah Silverman and all those kind of nasty, uncomfortable, squirm in your seat shows. I love slapstick and I love extreme slapstick where it is so awful you're laughing but in that weird place where you're stopping yourself from crying - or your cringe got so big it turned into a laugh. I also love Lucille Ball, there's an episode of I Love Lucy which has Tallulah Bankhead in it and I just love it - Lucy is putting on airs trying to impress Miss Tallulah Bankhead and it just is hilarious but says some interesting things about class and fame and about the insecurity of the artist and the whole time the pretence is going on you just know Lucy is going to be found out - and then there's this great scene where Lucy gets covered in paint - baha.

 

I really love it when people slip on banana skins - there's a scene in Arrested Development where Lucille (another great Lucille) spills wine on the kitchen floor during breakfast and everyone that comes in slips on it, I just have to think of that scene and I crack up. I recently re-watched the whole original series of The Office and man, I think that might be one of the greatest pieces of writing of our time, it feels so epic - like King Lear or something - Extras is the same, his latest stand-up is way more challenging than a lot of literary fiction I've read lately. I don't like it much but I love the way Gervais finds society's line and waves at us from the other side so we can't help but notice there is a line and ask ourselves why. Comedy is where all the stretch happens I reckon - politically and morally. Look at Infinite Jest, one of the funniest books I've ever read."

VUP authors Tim Wilson and Kate Camp are finalists for Best Book, Fiction and Poetry respectively. The winners for the remaining awards will be announced present at the Awards Ceremony on Wednesday, 27 July 2011.

Tim Wilson has also just launched a new website.

 

 

The Catastrophe, a free extract

May 26, 2011 | A Book by Ian Wedde

 

The Age of Excess has been good to Christopher Hare. One of the world's top food writers, he has travelled to the best restaurants in the most exotic locations, with the chic dining companion known to readers of his lavish books as Thé Glacé. But, in the new mood of austerity ushered in by the credit crunch, will the world still be interested in what he thinks of Robuchon's caramelised quail? Certainly Christopher's editor isn't. Christopher's moment of truth catches up with him in the corrupt space between the violent Lebanese civil war of 1975-90 and the luxurious bolt-holes of the Riviera. One evening, almost at the bottom of his over-the-hill slope, he is investigating the budget options in a mediocre restaurant in off-season Nice. These days he is no longer accompanied by Thé Glacé, aka Mary Pepper, who has found international fame and fortune as an art photographer of pornographically eroticised foodstuffs. In the restaurant, Christopher witnesses an assassination. Impulsively, he throws himself into the action, and becomes the almost-willing victim of a political kidnapping. What will be Christopher's fate? Will his ex-wife 'Thé Glacé' come to his rescue? Will the harshly beautiful Palestinian paediatrician Hawwa Habash soften towards her accidental prisoner? Suffused with culinary delights and political menace, The Catastrophe is a novel which speaks urgently to our rapidly changing times.

Download for free the first chapter of The Catastrophe by Ian Wedde.

 

(Due out in July)

 

On Disagreeing

May 24, 2011 | An opinion piece by Tim Wilson

When the generally-certified Book of the Year, triumphant of the Pulitzer Prize, gilded by the National Book Award, and feted by reviewers, is also a book that you’ve reviled, inscribed with exclamation marks and crosses, thrown across the room, picked up, given away and had to take back, isn’t more than simple churlishness on display?

Yes, thank goodness.

This isn’t the forum to debate the demerits and merits of A Visit From The Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan. Hit me up on Twitter or something. I’m more interested in examining the benefits and discontents not going along.

These began to form, like inclement weather, even before the victim showed up. It’s an odd feeling when a book has approbation pre-loaded. Like all people, I enjoy –within limits- being told what to do/think/be, but highly-praised titles carry a weight far beyond the material accumulation of pages and words. In a certain kind of personality they immediately set up a counterbalance. “Oh goody,” the Id froths, “here’s a chance to be disagreeable.”

I may have aspects of said personality; I’m not alone.

If membership has its privileges, pariahhood is not without rewards. In theory, everyone wants to be Oscar Wilde, and no one wants to be Lord Alfred Douglas. Of course, when everyone is Oscar Wilde, they're actually Lord Alfred Douglas. New York magazine has wittily graphed the reed-like shifting of consensus in what it calls The Curve. So you have: The pre-Buzz, The Buzz, Rave Reviews, Saturation Point, Overhyped, Backlash, and finally the Gotterdammerung of criticism, Backlash to the Backlash.

Generally, criticism from the 'Backlash' phase manifests as an appeal to standards and the defense against cultural anarchy. The subject under discussion is a travesty of blah; an incitement to blech. Few critics will admit the following: Envy always comes dressed as morality.

I am envious. My waistline, and much more besides, would be immeasurably firmed by a Pulitzer.

Returning to The Curve. By the time The Backlash has commenced, the argument is no longer with the author, or the book they believed themselves to have been writing. It's with abstractions, modish sentiments (the importance of 'experimentalism', say), and –mostly- factions. It's a treatise on the politics of praise. This can apply to defenders, as much as attackers.

And yet... Shouldn't you take up cudgels for what you believe?

But arguments evacuate belief so quickly, if indeed they were ever rooted in it. Being the howling, lonely voice of dissent amongst the more harmonic chorus gets… old. 'Why do you care so much?' another voice asks, 'It’s only taste.' Since Bourdieu, we all know that taste is a representation of the desire of economic classes to auto-reinforce.

Put it another way: ‘Don’t you want to get along with nice people who are in the same spot as you?’

Maybe not. As an occasional Backlash merchant, I can report that beating something when it's up makes you feel both valid, and invalid.

Ultimately, hating the widely-regarded thing carries a worse hazard: self-congratulation. You think, ‘If everyone's wrong about this, what else are they wrong about?’ A struggle (brief, limp) ensues with the follow up question, ‘What else are you right about?’

At which point, just possibly, novels may start to get written, the silly ones, as well as those much-rarer classics.

 

 

Tim Wilson

The movie may be slightly different

May 18, 2011 | an extract

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Branching out

Whose arm is it, such pallor
stretching as far from the window
to the end of the branch?
                                    The black
arm, you mean, as you stand beneath it?

 

Moonscript writing its lines
for different voices.

 

By Vincent O'Sullivan from The movie may be slightly different

This new collection offers a rich harvest of recent poems displaying the wit, intellectual agility and arresting beauty for which Vincent O'Sullivan is renowned.

Was it something I said?

May 17, 2011 | thoughts from LYNN DAVIDSON

The Nelson School of Music has the most beautiful concert hall. It looks like the inverted hull of a ship – narrow wood beams make a long, deep curve overhead.  I’m told it has, arguably, the best acoustics in New Zealand. I was at the Nelson School of Music thanks to the generosity of my Nelson friends, Rachel Bush and Richard Nunns. They gave me a ticket to hear the fabulous Whirimako Black, guitarist Nigel Gavin and Richard himself who was to play a variety of traditional Maori instruments.
The concert was on the night before I was taking my worldly belongings back to Wellington after a year teaching on the writing programme at the Nelson Marlborough Institute of Technology. In the time I was at NMIT, a decision was made to axe the writing programme. Was it something I said? But really, if you listen hard enough, you can hear the sound of arts programmes losing limbs all over Aotearoa New Zealand.
In a particularly memorable staff meeting, one of our executive said that in these belt-tightening times we needed to decide if we would rather a few of us be picked off by a sniper, or be randomly taken down by a Gatling gun (mowing down everyone in the room with his imaginary machine gun as he spoke).
Back to the concert. The fluid, engaging Whirimako interspersed John Coltrane and Leonard Cohen numbers with Waiata Maori written by her Ngai Tuhoe ancestors and living family. The waiata were spellbinding. It seemed that she wasn’t singing them, they were singing her.
If Whirimako evoked people and human connection, Richard Nunns evoked the landscape. Sometimes a familiar landscape: the liquid hush of the sea, a chill wind across hills, the surprise drop from one element to another - sky to earth, earth to sea. And sometimes other-worldly landscapes that we do and don’t know: the hollow, woody tapping that raises your heartbeat, the lift and pulse of the breath through a gun barrel.  Yes, a gun barrel. Ngai Tuhoe, Richard explained, found a unique use for the barrel of a gun. They amputated the barrel from the stock, put their mouth over the thick metal circle at the trigger end and blew, making a similar sound to the traditional conch shell, but even more achy - as though broken hearts were involved. At times, with a slight pulse of the barrel and a shift of the lips, the sound billowed, like waves. In this way Ngai Tuhoe organised their communal eating: a call to lay the food, another to lift it, the call to Marae to eat. Sometimes a call signaled a death.
The gun barrel replaced the putatara, the conch shells, which were largely given away as gifts. Car horns replaced guns, and now cellphones call up and down the long deep valleys of the Ureweras.
 Art is slippery. It is a shape shifter. You cannot make it go away. Loss and fear take form. You turn a gun into an instrument and use it to bring people together. Carol Ann Duffy said that poetry is ‘the noise of being human’.  I think that definition could be applied to art generally. It calls out, it calls up, and at times it calls to account.

 

Lynn Davidson

 

 

Bernadette Hall reads The History of Europe

May 10, 2011 | A reading from The Best of Best NZ Poems

Since 2000, the online anthology Best New Zealand Poems has showcased the most exciting and memorable poetry produced in this country. Here, for the first time, is a selection of this work in book form. Edited by founding publisher Bill Manhire, and writer Damien Wilkins, this anthology is an indispensable guide to the richness, strangeness, and liveliness of contemporary poetry.

The Best New Zealand Poems website will have a bounty of recordings of poets reading their work in a couple of weeks. While you wait you can listen to Bernadette Hall reading her piece from The Best of Best New Zealand Poems here:

 

 

 

 

Damien Wilkins On The Best of Best New Zealand Poems

May 9, 2011 | An extract from The Best of Best NZ Poems introduction

 

 

If I were put against a wall and asked to make any sort of general observation about the poetry here, it would have something to do with, well, fun. Not a very high-minded concept, I know. A kind of buoyancy then. Or lightness, in the sense Italo Calvino asked for when he wrote that ‘thoughtful lightness can make frivolity dull and heavy’. It’s there obviously, wonderfully, in a poem like Rachel Bush’s ‘The Strong Mothers’, with Mrs Chapman who ‘heated records and shaped them into vases for presents’; it’s there in the best baby-in-the bed poem ever written, Graham Lindsay’s ‘big bed’: ‘Her ring-finger hand covers one breast/He sucks the other and fiddles/with my penis with his foot’; it’s there in Anne Kennedy’s rugby poem: ‘Five-nil to them./Fuck. And fuck/the conversion/too . . .’
                These, you might argue, are comic poems and are just behaving as they should, and yet the same buoyancy animates several senior elegies.
                When Allen Curnow writes ‘. . . Gently as I stroke/this child’s head, I’m thinking, “Goodbye!” and then goes on to rhyme ‘season’s crop’ with ‘wither and drop’, the humour carries the weight—there is no weight.
                You could say Sam Hunt is feeling sad in ‘Lines for a New Year’, but the sections open and close like strange and powerful riddles:

                It’s a love song
                between a mother and son.
               
                The son plays the drums
                and wrote the song.
               
                On the recording
                mother sings the song
               
                like mothers do. And the
                son plays the drums
               
                like a good boy. It’s a
                love song.

Instantly, I’d like to make that my blindfold test for New Zealand poetry: name the writer. And if Sam Hunt can manage, gloriously, not to sound especially like Sam Hunt, I reckon the gates are open.
                You only need sample opening lines to catch similar acts of disorientation: ‘I make telephone calls/to my bones, eat evenings’ (Johanna Aitchison); ‘All day today the ice melted./My name is Queen.’ (Anna Jackson); ‘The computer is dead; long live the computer’ (Cilla McQueen); ‘pity the poor giraffe/lost on the frozen steppe’ (James Norcliffe); ‘I auditioned for the part. And this way/I came to dance’ (Gregory O’Brien); ‘If it was tattooed in Maori there’d be an indigenous Universe/in this curvy groove—but it’s a problem of bleeding translation’ (Robert Sullivan’); ‘Get off my back/daughter’ (Michele Amas); ‘She emerged from the bamboo forest/with a white, fleshy-petalled flower/and her gun.’ (Amy Brown).
                Of course it’s not all like this, and yet the headlong rush into odd scenarios and askew voicings gives this anthology much of its tone. Here are the first four lines of Joan Fleming’s ‘Theory of Light’:

                Andy goes craving all over the beach
                With her red grip and her red grapple.
               
                A red apple after dark isn’t red,
                It’s a black apple.

Andy? Because that’s the poet’s friend’s name? Or because it makes a nice sound with apple? And where did all this excited utterance come from? Did language itself cause the colours to pop as they do here? Whatever work we care to engage in figuring out the meaning of Fleming’s beachcombing—and the poem as it progresses is clearly not nonsense, not only sounds—it’s that eruptive, confident address which is grabbing.
                I find myself grabbed in this way a lot as I read these poems. So there’s confidence, yes, but also a feeling of agitation and short-circuited stories. Facts come at us fast without obvious illumination: ‘Ernest Hemingway found rain to be made of knowledge . . .’ (Paula Green). The narratives crackle but they often break down. There’s immediacy but it can be sourceless. And at the risk of pathologising the decade, it looks also like a time of jitteriness, agitation. The boldness of these poems is striking and often strikingly unresolved. Does calm never come to our poor poets?

This is an extract from the introduction of The Best of Best New Zealand Poems.

The Best of Best New Zealand Poems is launched this week at the Auckland Writers & Readers Festival.

All Time Moving

May 5, 2011 | A Poem by Jenny Bornholdt

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

All Time Moving

 

 

At Barton Marine
I still cannot feel
my heart.

Up ahead,
my mother’s old apartment—
fourth floor—pours
water. Towards me comes
a woman, walking,
reading; a thing my son
and husband do. Last year
the son forsook
French art
for books.

My heart remains
unheard from.
Notebook too.
In it there’s a recipe
copied
from a waiting-room
magazine.

Chillies, cardamom, bay,
accompany the lamb.
I strike the hill of wool—
here goes the heart,
even at the start
anticipating difficulty.

As at my mother’s move—
the speeded beat
as we unpacked boxes
of my father’s impossible handwriting
still unable to figure out
what it was
he was saying.

 

By Jenny Bornholdt, from The Hill of Wool, due in stores next week.

The Hill of Wool is a book about memories. Some memories live and grow in families. Some are inspired by rediscovered children's songs and stories. Others are triggered by chance encounters with old friends. Sometimes personal and lyrical, sometimes jagged and strange like untamed children's rhymes, these new poems will delight.

You can see Jenny at the Auckland Writer's & Readers Festival on May 13th.

A traveller from an antique land visits the Ridgeway Dairy

May 4, 2011 | An essay by Kate Camp

 

Whenever I drive past the Ridgeway Dairy – which is often now because I live in the neighbourhood – I think about Shelley’s sonnet “Ozymandias”.

 

Well, I should say I think about “Ozymandias” and then I think, is that by Keats? No, Byron. No! It’s Shelley, because he wrote it in a sonnet competition with among others Mary Shelley on a holiday somewhere. Maybe Switzerland. She wrote Frankenstein the same weekend, or started it, so while Percy won the sonnet contest, she probably did better overall.

Anyways the reason I always think of “Ozymandias” is that a few years ago I spent about twenty minutes parked there, memorising it. I was in a memorising poetry phase, when I would carry my poem of the moment in my wallet and, in spare moments, learn it in chunks.

 My friend Sylvia lives near the dairy and I was running a bit early for a visit with her, so instead of tidying the glovebox or purging old text messages, I practiced “Ozymandias” and finally nailed the really hard bit in the middle.

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.

The hand that mocked what exactly? And the heart that fed what ? If I have to explain it I suppose I take it to mean that the sculptor’s hand is the hand that mocked the passions, while Ozymandias’ heart is the thing that fed those passions. Who really cares.

What I find is that, once you learn a poem off by heart, the bit you end up loving the most is often not one of the really “good” bits of the poem. Quite often you end up really attached to a bit that is, objectively, quite rubbish.
I said to Bill Manhire a while ago that “Dover Beach” by Matthew Arnold is one of my all time favourite poems, and he said, with a creeped out look on his face, “but what about the girdle thing?”

He was referring to:
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Of course he’s right, the girdle thing is a huge problem. But because I love the poem so much, and because I know it off by heart, I can not only tolerate the girdle, I have actually come to really like it. I just like saying the words “girdle furled” even though I know they are forced, and silly, and in questionable taste.

I reckon all poets should take comfort from the fact that if someone loves your poem enough, they will even love the crappy bits.

 

Kate Camp

Some fresh reading

May 2, 2010 |

We have a tasty new regime lined up for the VUP blog. Each week we'll be featuring some of our top talent with guest posts from our authors and extracts from new titles. This week you can look forward to some musings on poetry from Kate Camp and a new poem from the Hill of Wool by Jenny Bornholdt.

 

New ebooks from VUP

VUP have issued another batch of ebooks including an old favourite, Catherine Chidgey's award winning In a fishbone church. We haven't forgotten physical books though, and have reissued In a fisbone church in paper form as well, and there are a host of new titles coming out later this year which you can find out a little about on our Forthcoming books page. Hit the link to meBooks below to find out what other ebook titles are now available from VUP.

 

 

 

Yvonne Du Fresne (1929 – 2011)

March 16, 2011 |

We are very sad to hear of the passing of Yvonne du Fresne, whose Farvel and Other Stories was one of the early signs of the 1980s renaissance in New Zealand fiction.

This is from the IIML newsletter:

Yvonne du Fresne's chief early encouragers were Robin Dudding of Islands and Chris Hampson of Radio New Zealand, and her collection of short stories, Farvel, one of the first fiction titles published by Victoria University Press back in 1980, makes a special point of acknowledging their support. Farvel was a voice- and subject-discovering book for du Fresne. Its stories come to us through the eyes of a small child, Astrid Westergaard, growing up in a Danish family in the Manawatu in the 1930s, a time when all the classroom maps were still covered in British Empire pink.  Farvel is thus about the discovery of both personal and national identity.  Bill Manhire wrote in his introduction: “Like the oldest Norse tales, the Farvel stories have all the flair and pace of oral narrative . . . . But a better way of describing their effect might be to borrow the image of embroidery which appears so often in them. Farvel is like a tapestry, with fresh scenes being added story by story until at the last the richness of a complex picture is revealed. And Yvonne du Fresne's language can be like a needle flashing in and out of linen. Her writing has the intense, controlled exuberance of one of her Danish women at work on a piece of tapestry -  human energy directed well.” Yvonne du Fresne went on to publish more books, novels as well as short stories, and a fuller account of these (along with a Writers in Schools interview) is posted on the NZ Book Council's website.

The striking cover design by Lindsay Missen features a photograph of the young Yvonne.

 

Celebratory volume for Roger Robinson launched

March 7, 2011 |

Roger Robinson, Emeritus Professor of English, was honoured last Thursday by his academic colleagues at VUW and by his wide circle of close friends and admirers from the worlds of elite distance running, sports journalism, creative writing and many others.

The event, kept a secret till the last moment, was publication of Running, Writing, Robinson by VUP. Edited by colleagues in the School of English, Film, Theatre, and Media Studies (David Carnegie, Paul Millar, David Norton and Harry Ricketts), the volume has over fifty contributors, ranging from Lorraine Moller and Roger’s own son Jim among the runners, Tim Chamberlain and Lynn McConnell among the journalists, Fiona Kidman and Joy Cowley among the creative writers, Patrick Evans and Lawrence Jones among the academics, and Mike Hill, Phillip Mann, and Jeremy Commons among former colleagues at VUW.

Sadness tinged the celebration as news emerged in the hours preceding the launch that Brian Taylor, one of Roger’s closest friends and running companions, and a contributor to the book who was expected to attend, was among those beneath the rubble of the CTV building in Christchurch. Roger acknowledged the deep loss, but reminded everyone present, “If anyone can survive, a tough runner like Taylor will; and had he been here, he would have been the first to start partying”.

Anne Else read the poem with which that her late husband, Harvey McQueen, saluted Roger in the book, including lines that acknowledge Roger’s service to both running and university:

            I recall gyroscopic feet pounding
            track & pavement, mile stretching to
            marathon, athlete’s gossip, speaker’s
            rostrum, announcer’s microphone

                                    * * *

            Unsung, the diplomatic bureaucrat
            weaving easily through university,
            educational & public service politics

Another contributor and colleague, Stephanie Pietkiewicz, was quoted at the launch for her reminder of Roger as a teacher and writer as well as a runner: “He opened the lecture. . . . His objective not merely to get to the destination, but to show us meaning’s journey through language. This was no mere intellectual examination; it was textual cross-country. . . . His writing pulls you into its pace, all slow acceleration or sudden surge, unput-downable, unstoppable till the very last full stop.”

(From Vic News)

The Violinist on screen

March 2, 2011 |

The Violinist continues to gain momentum as readers connect with Clare Galambos Winter's moving story so eloquently told by Sarah Gaitanos (pictured). You can watch Clare and Sarah discuss the book on Good Morning here. Kate De Goldi gave the book a glowing review on Good Morning the previous week. This book is an important addition to the histories of both the Holocaust and postwar New Zealand culture, and a moving human document.

 

 

 

Congratulations to Professor Sir Paul Callaghan

Fe 8, 2011 |

Victoria University Press congratulates Professor Sir Paul Callaghan on being named New Zealander of the year. To celebrate, here is a free download of his essay 'Luminous Moments', the afterword to Are Angels OK?, the book he edited with Bill Manhire.

 

‘Are Angels OK?’ asked Bill the poet.
‘Angels are just fine,’ said Paul the physicist.

 

 

 

 

Jet-setting Tim Wilson wows audinces in New York and Auckland

Feb 8 2011 |

It has been reported to the VUP office that Tim Wilson entertained a willing and satisfied audience of hard-bitten New Yorkers late last month. Okay, most of them were New Zealanders, and there was a fair amount of wine involved (also, free pies!), nevertheless it sounds like a roaring success. Here are Tim and his editor Jolisa Gracewood with their faces shining (must have been the pies).
Prior to his New York launch Tim also had a very successful event in Auckland (Thanks to Unity Books) conversing with Noelle McCarthy about the taboo big three: sex, religion and politics. You can listen to him talking with Noelle McCarthy on Radio NZ here.

 

A New Year and a new list

Feb 8, 2011 |

We are back on board and the production schedule is looking great. Our first launch of the year was for The Violinist on Holocaust Remembrance Day. You can listen to an excellent podcast of Eva Radich interviewing Clare Galamos Winter here.

This year is going to great for our poetry list, with new titles from Dinah Hawken, Airini Beautrais, Jenny Bornholdt and Brian Turner in just the first 6 months! Also coming up is an anthology of the Best New Zealand Poems sourced from the online journal of the same name and edited by Bill Manhire & Damien Wilkins.

Merry Christmas from Victoria University Press

Everyone here at VUP would like to wish our readers, authors and contributors a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

 

As a little present from VUP, we've made a chapter of our recent release, New Zealand As It Might Have Been 2 available as a free download via the meBooks site here. In this clever piece of speculative history Patrick Evans, author of acclaimed novel Gifted, considers what could have been, rather than simply what was.  Evans brings Katherine Mansfield back to Days Bay, composting her vege garden, writing with a cigarette hanging out of her mouth - her eyes squinting through the smoke.

 

Please remember that if you're ordering from the VUP site over the Christmas break, the office of VUP will be closed between the 22nd of December and the 4th of January and orders will not be supplied during that period.

Waiting for Google ebooks in NZ? Come over to our place now while you wait.

December 20, 2010 |

Victoria University Press welcomes Google ebooks recent launch in the States. While New Zealanders wait for access we would like to remind them that wonderful New Zealand books can be downloaded right now from mebooks.co.nz, also via vicbooks.co.nz  or victoria.ac.nz/vup.
We've got some ebooks which will make great reading over the upcoming holiday period, including Patrick Evan's novel about Frank Sargeson and Janet Frame, Gifted (on the lists of many reviewers best picks of 2010), and Tim Wilson's post-rapture novel Their Faces Were Shining. Both of these titles were included in the Listener's 100 Top Books of 2010, along with Pierre Furlan's The Collector's Dream and Bill Manhire's The Victims of Lightning.
Our newest ebook is Motel View by Forbes Williams. First published in 1992, Motel View was acclaimed by reviewers and shortlisted for the 1993 Wattie Award, but it remains Forbes Williams' only book (so far) and is something of a lost classic.

We’ve been releasing ebooks since July. They are a mixture of New Zealand history, novels, short stories and poetry. We have not restricted ourselves to obvious bestsellers, but have chosen a diverse range of books in order to test the interest from different parts of the community.

The nature of the internet means that it is as easy, quick and safe to buy an ebook from mebooks.co.nz as it is from a major retailer, and VUP’s ebooks are available in both industry standard ePub format, which works on most readers, and mobi, which works on Amazon’s Kindle.

Useful information on ebook readers and reading ebooks on your computer can be found by clicking the ‘ebook readers’ banner at the lower left of every mebooks.co.nz page.

 

Listener Best Books 2010

 

VUP are very well represented in the Listener's Best Books of 2010, which features no fewer than nine VUP titles, all perfect, dare we say, for someone on your christmas shopping lists.

 

The titles are:

Gifted - Patrick Evans, 
Their Faces Were Shining - Tim Wilson 
The Collector’s Dream - Pierre Furlan
Hicksville - Dylan Horrocks
The Mirror of Simple Annihilated Souls - Kate Camp 
The Victims of Lightning - Bill Manhire 
Report on Experience - John Mulgan
Reading on the Farm - Lydia Wevers 
Serious Fun - Norman Meehan

 

What If?

VUP are delighted to announce the publication of the next volume of New Zealand speculative histories, New Zealand As It Might Have Been 2.A further 17 portraits of possible New Zealand History are explored, a mix of short stories and commentaries, some whimsical, others grim, each offering a perceptive and plausible new slant on significant events and personalities. An excellent series of radio documentaries, featuring authors from both volumes, can be found here.

 

Gifted launched with a jolt

November 1, 2010

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Launching a book after it's been on sale for six weeks is a big risk. It can be like a memorial service. But this was definitely not the case with Gifted which, after appearing on the NZ fiction bestseller list for 5 weeks straight, has risen to number 3 on the list. Appropriately there was a good jolt of a quake during the launch, which barely managed to ruffle any feathers of the calm Cantabrians. Gifted continues to receive rave reviews.

 

Read Kate De Goldi's excellent launch speech here.

 

VUP authors collaborate to produce Jazz CD

September 22nd 2010

BUDDHIST RAIN
Norman Meehan and Bill Manhire with Hannah Griffin (voice) and Colin Hemmingsen (reeds). Award-winning poet, Bill Manhire, and composer/pianist Norman Meehan have collaborated to create the first settings of Bill Manhire’s poetry. Sung by Wellington chanteuse Hannah Griffin, the songs are predominantly ballads strong on melody and mood.

Bill Manhire is one of our best-selling and most enjoyed poets. Norman Meehan is a well-established composer and performer, whose album THE BELLS was nominated for Best Album in the 2008 NZ Jazz Awards. This album follows the strong SUN MOON STARS RAIN, in which Norman set poems by e.e.cummings, again with Hannah singing.

Bill Manhire: “I had mixed feelings when Norman first got in touch about setting my poems. Didn’t they have music already? But I like what he did with them enormously – I feel that he has somehow found new cadences and melodies in the words that are as true as anything I felt was there originally. And I love Hannah’s voice.”

 

Norman Meehan: “Having set, performed and recorded some poems by e.e.cummings, I was interested in working with material closer to home. A friend gave me a pile of New Zealand poetry books, and as much as I enjoyed them, the poems didn’t really spark musical ideas for me, until I started reading Bill Manhire’s Collected Poems. Over the first two weeks of looking at these poems, I had written six songs, which is incredibly productive for me, but the poems were so rich and pregnant with music they just kind of popped out.”

FREE LAUNCH CONCERT — BUDDHIST RAIN
None of us get much for free these days, but the launch concert for BUDDHIST RAIN is exactly that – free.
7pm. Thursday 23 September, The Soundings Theatre, Te Papa
No bookings. Turn up and claim your ticket on the night.

Two further concerts will be happening in Wellington in late October. These will also include material from the e.e. cummings album.
22 October Friday: St Andrew’s on the Terrace, 6.30 p.m.
26 October Tuesday: St Mark’s Church, 58 Woburn Rd, Lower Hutt, 7.30 p.m.
$25 / $15 Students with ID / $60 Family / $7 school students

(Source Rattle Newsletter)

www.rattle.co.nz - www.rattlejazz.com - www.rattlerecords.net

 

Praise for Gifted

September 21st 2010

A new novel by Patrick Evans that fictionalises one of the great encounters in New Zealand literature, between Janet Frame and Frank Sargeson, is receiving praise from many sources. Gifted was the subject of a recent story in the Listener entitled A New Frame for Frame (the full article is here) and is continuing to raise questions about biographical fiction since it's launch. Laurence Jones writing in the Otago Daily Times about Gifted says "He has chosen to tell it from the point of view of Sargeson, looking back a year later (and his capturing of the later freer and more garrulous Sargeson...is a triumph)". Writing in The Dominion Post's Your Weekend, Bruce Harding writes "Evans...constructs a moving appreciation of Frame by the cranky old fusspot Sargeson."

 

 

Two VUP authors scoop awards at the "Posties"

August 31, 2010

Brian Turner, a leading biographer, essayist, poet and conservationist, was presented with the 2010 New Zealand Post Book Award for Poetry for his collection, "Just This", described by judge Elizabeth Smither as a life's work in its reach, its depth and its deceptive plainness of surface. He took the prize ahead of fellow VUP author Bernadette Hall. 'Just This dares to ask the profoundest questions about place and human existence, how we live now and how we hand the world on. It is dangerous poetry because it addresses ethics but at the same time it is leavened with a sweet and sly self-awareness as it searches for "something you can have faith in, swear by". The journey from the first poem to the last is a revelation,' says Smither.

 

Anna Taylor, the winner of the 2010 NZSA Hubert Church Best First Book Award for Fiction - announced earlier this year - was also honoured for her short story collection"Relief".

 

 

VUP launches more e-books

August 16, 2010

We're delighted to announce that we have expanded the number of titles available as e-books through meBooks. The titles now available include recent releases such as Damien Wilkin's Somebody Loves Us All and Bill Manhire's The Victims of Lightning, along with old favourites such as The Vintner's Luck by Elizabeth Knox. You can view all of VUP's available e-books by clicking here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

VUP Welcomes new publicist Helen Heath

July 29, 2010 |

Helen Heath doesn't like talking about herself in the third person so I'll start by saying "Hello"! I'm excited to be joining the VUP team. I've got a background in publishing and bookselling and I recently completed my MA in creative Writing at the IIML (in poetry). I'll be managing the website and social media as well as being in close contact with traditional media. We now have a Facebook page, where you can keep up to date with our daily goings on, come over and have a look. We'll also be Tweeting a bit more now since I'm a real chatterbox. In my spare time I blog at Helen Heath dot com. There's a fun interview with Fergus Barrowman and Elizabeth Knox over there at the moment - I got my revenge for all the job interview questions!

 

Lives of the Poets to be launched on National Poetry Day

July 29, 2010 |

John Newton's long awaited second book of poetry is being launched this Friday, July 30th as part of National Poetry Day celebrations at Unity Books Wellington from 5.30pm (all welcome).

 

John Newton’s debut volume Tales from the Angler’s Eldorado came out in 1985, and his work is represented in most of the major anthologies to have appeared since that time. Lives of the Poets is the long-awaited follow-up. In poems that range from lyric to satire, and from formalist set-pieces to extended verse narrative, this book charts a journey through the backblocks of Romanticism and through fractured contemporary landscapes of writing and feeling.

 

 

 

A flurry of launches

July 29, 2010 |

 

 

 

We've had a wonderful flurry of launches this month. Lydia Wever's Reading on the Farm was launched in an extraordinary venue - Brancepeth Station by the extraordinary James Belich. The book is a fascinating social history of a Victorian sheep station through its library and Pepysian diaries from a frustrated librarian / clerk John Vaughan Miller. Lydia read a hilarious excerpt from the book - a letter from Miller to his employer:

Te Kohanga
Motueka, Nelson
Monday 22 Jan, 1900.

My dear Mr Beetham
I did not have a very pleasant drive in the mail buggy. We no sooner got to your bridge tha[n] we picked up Mrs McRae and 2 boys - and a trifle of luggage. At the Parae a hunch-back got in - so the 2 boys were put over into the front with the driver and myself - I need not say it was the reverse of enjoyable. At the Taueru we stopped some time, because Mrs Stronvar was expected, and was welcomed by the McIntosh family with great effusion - a considerable infusion must have followed, for, when the lady reappeared, there was an apoplectic suffusion of her extremely beautiful countenance, and, as I thought, some confusion of ideas - If what she had thankfully partaken of was only tea, it must have been a capital T, and far and away the strongest letter of the alphabet.
But worse was to come - when we got opposite to Tuhua's house, out came a double-peonied faced thing calling itself a woman - and I need scarcely say her name was Mrs Parsons. The driver looked at me, and I was far from smiling - Mrs P. came smirking to the front where self, driver, & 2 boys were already stowed, besides luggage, and she lifted a fearful thing (which may possibly have been a leg) to mount - I merely remarked to the driver, " I shall not allow this; put me down at once with my luggage" - He only smiled and whipped up his horses, and said "thank you, Mr Miller: I was hoping you would speak" - Mrs P was simply left in the middle of the road, like Lot's wife - and not one of us had the manners to express a word of regret.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hinemoana Baker's long awaited second book Koiwi Koiwi was heartily launched by Teresia Teaiwa to a heaving crowd at the Ballroom cafe. Hinemoana and Chris White played music to an appreciative crowd before reading and performing a stunning sonic poem with Teresia.

You can read Teresia's fantastic speech here.

We are very excited for Hinemoana, who has been chosen to go to the prestigious International Writing Programme in Iowa. A huge honour!

Dr Wally Penetito's What's Maori About Maori Education launch was a family affair. The book is a story of what it feels like to be a Maori in an education system where, for more than a century, equality, social justice and fairness for all New Zealanders has been promised but not adequately provided.

 

 

Keely O'Shannessy Wins Young Designer of the Year Award

VUP would like to heartily congratulate Keely O'Shannessy for winning the Awa Press Young Designer of the Year Award at the PANZ Book Design Awards 2010. We love her work, and it seems the judges do too - "If a successful cover makes you want to pick a book up, these make you want to pick them up, turn them over and take them home." More details of the awards can be found here.

 

Keely won this year for the cover of Patricia Grace's Ned & Katina. Among her many great covers for VUP, Keely designed the cover for Eleanor Catton's award winning The Rehearsal.

 

 

 

 

Relief Wins Best First Book Award

 

Victoria University Press is delighted to congratulate Anna Taylor winner of the NZSA Hubert Church Best First Book Award for her book of short stories Relief.

 To celebrate, we are excited to announce the release of Relief as our first e-book, in conjunction with meBooks (www.mebooks.co.nz) along with praised new author Pip Adam’s short stories Everything We Hoped For.

 We are also thrilled to congratulate Bernadette Hall and Brian Turner, poetry finalists, who will have e-versions of their books, released with further VUP titles in the near future. All our e-books are available via the links on the books page, or by going directly to meBooks.

 

 

 

 

About Relief

Relief introduces an astonishingly mature and confident new voice in New Zealand fiction. Emily Perkins says: These are wonderful stories, exquisitely observed and recorded with delicacy and wit.

The stories effortlessly mix the menacing and the comic, and handle real-life situations with warmth and subtlety. A little girl out of her depth in her friendship with an adult neighbour; an armed intruder thwarted by a bee; a woman determined to believe in her brother’s goodness under the shadow of accusation; a Christmas dinner guest who will eat only peas…

Anna Taylor was born in 1982. She completed the MA in Creative Writing at Victoria University in 2006, and won the Adam Prize in Creative Writing for the manuscript she wrote during that year, which became Relief.

Taylor has produced a superb debut collection, is unafraid to turn calamities into blessings, and writes with the elegance and composure of a silversmith. I can't wait to read what she does next.        - Paula Green NZ HERALD

For more information, to arrange an interview with Anna or for review copies please contact Craig Gamble at Victoria University Press ph 04 4636580

 

 

Two New Perspectives on Education

June 2, 2010

This week VUP publishes two important new books about education in New Zealand. Wally Penetito's What's Maori About Maori Education? talks about what it is like to be Maori in an education system where equality, social justice and fairness for all New Zealanders has been promised but not delivered. Meanwhile Looking Back from the Centre, edited by Joanna Kidman and Ken Stevens, remembers the integral role of the School of Education in Wellington's educational domain since its establishment in 1927, and looks forward to its continuing influence on education in New Zealand and internationally.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Competition Winner!

Many thanks to all who entered the competiton to win three new titles from VUP. The winner is Tim from Nelson, and the three signed books are on their way South, congratulations!

 

Real life in three new books

Last night’s launch of three new books drew as big and enthusiastic a crowd as we have ever experienced at Unity. The writers read brilliantly and were mobbed at the end. Counting down, they were:

Ingrid Horrocks, whose Mapping the Distance is her third book. Ingrid read three poems, ending with ‘Light Between Houses’, for her partner Tim Corballis:

There in the brightness
as we talked back and forth, forth and back
each word seeming to come from a depth
in our bodies; we hardly touched before
I pushed against you and tasted your skin.

 

Anna Livesey, whose The Moonmen is her second book. Anna read the very moving sequence about her mother, the writer Janet McCallum, which ends with the lines:

There is no way of saying we are sorry, save to hold you.
There is no way to hold or save you.

 

Pip Adam, whose Everything We Hoped For is her first book. Pip had the audience in stitches with this ‘every word is true’ extract from ‘You’ve Come a Long Way Baby’:

We have a week north of London first, in a friend’s flat, in a huge tenement block, in Stevenage. People in Stevenage look like they’re taking the piss out of themselves. It’s chav heaven. There are whole families in shell suits. We catch the train into London, go to galleries and look through the bars of Buckingham Palace. We see squirrels, and marble steps that are worn away by millions of people, over hundreds of years, climbing them. We sleep on the lounge floor and annoy each other – but it’s cheap.

 

On Thursday a black car turns up outside and the driver calls and asks if we can come down because he’s a bit worried about leaving the car there. We come down in the piss-smelling lift and he puts our backpacks in the boot of the shiny, black car that local youths are now standing around and shouting at. We get driven to Milton Keynes in the grey cold.

 

The hotel we’re staying in is like Fawlty Towers. There are ducks, and people in sunglasses arrive and hug each other. All the way in the car, Bo says, ‘Be cool, just be cool.’ When the big stars start arriving at the hotel I am very, very uncool. When I say big stars, I mean Giles from Buffy, and all the hobbits and people from Star Trek: The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine. One of the hobbits gives Bo a hug, says ‘Boooh,’ and pats him as far up his back as he can reach. A taxi arrives, it’s the female cyborg from Terminator 3. Someone carries her luggage for her. We go to our room and Bo goes for a walk. He says he saw a fox but I highly doubt it. He’s nervous. It’s all about him. Tomorrow he has to earn our trip to England. At dinner I look around and think, this is ridiculous. I want to say to him, ‘Don’t be nervous, this is ridiculous,’ but I’m not sure whether it would help or hinder.

 

The next morning a limousine picks us up. We travel with a former child star and his wife who looks like what most people would expect the wife of a former child star to look like. A man who was in Goonies with the child star is reading the paper. He starts ripping out an article and says, ‘I gotta save this for Benicio – he wants to play Che.’ He seems to be saying it to me, so I sort of smile and nod. Nothing in my life has really prepared me for a conversation of this nature.

 

There are hundreds of people at the mall when we get there. It’s a bit of a mutant ghetto welcome. They scream and we get escorted down an aisle between the screaming people. Someone says the hobbits came separately. They’re coming round the back while we’re coming in the front – we’re a diversion.

 

They haven’t opened the mall yet and inside there are tables set up with huge posters above them. One of the women who came with us in the limousine is beautiful; I keep looking at her, thinking she probably plays some sexy vampire or something. She sits under a poster of herself with a Klingon crab-shell on her forehead. George Takei is there and the guy who used to be in Benson. Bo gets ushered under a photo of him as the Witch King, which could be anyone. I say, ‘Have fun’ and they sit the albino twins from the Matrix 2 on one side of him and Pussy Galore on the other. Then they open the doors.

 

 

Win Three New Books!

VUP is offering you the chance to win one copy of three new titles, Mapping The Distance, The Moonmen and Everything We Hoped For, all signed by the authors. Just email the answer to the question below by Friday the 21st May, 2010; and we'll put you in the draw. The winner will be announced on Monday the 24th May, 2010.

The question is:

What is the title of the forthcoming CD by Norman Meehan, which contains settings of poems by Bill Manhire? Here's a clue, Norman Meehan's book on Mike Nock will be released by VUP later this year.

Good Luck!

`

Triple Treat of New Writing

VUP is delighted to announce the publication of three new books coming later this month. Two new books of poetry, Ingrid Horrock's Mapping the Distance, and Anna Livesey's The Moonmen; along with Pip Adam's debut book of stories Everything We Hoped For, will all be published on the 21st May. All three will be launched at Unity Books Wellington on the evening of the 20th May, all welcome.

 

Check back soon for details on how to win all three titles!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

FOR MORE NEWS, CLICK HERE