cabbage tree
shadows dancing in the hologram
on the ceiling not here
and not there
an in-box the size
of a house
in his neck
I bury my face
breathe in
butter taste of summer corn
sweet plums an apricot almost
perfect in its remembrance
I took the road to anhedonia
forgetting the child on my hip
burying his face in my shoulder
I am that child only that child
looking into the eyes of stone
she flinches
because my hands surprise her
feeling for the soft coat the place to clip
lead to collar
she doesn’t see too well
an old dog going deaf but selectively
the nose now only nine thousand times
more acute than mine
the back legs
beginning to fold but still good
for a tiptoe raid on the cat’s plate
look at her
black pearl an old lady
out for a walk in the sunshine
and we go into the shadows
slow
stumbling
sometimes on a stone step
the footing
problematic but the maps still delivering
coordinates and forecasts
little dog
black weight on the bed at midnight
love uncloses your eyes
the stone bird
is blind and something I must face
sits behind it making a noise like water
descant on that other madrigal
power tools shaping wood and stone
machining a filigree that falls like moonlight
on the workshop floor
did I dream this
or did I walk out of the house
asking forgiveness and unable to see
anything but my feet entering the shadow
hearing small waves fall over themselves
at the water’s edge now my hand
finds the bird and my fingers trace
the incisions in fantastic replica
not here and not there an otherwhere
pouring itself through the gap
(2009)
Bill Manhire, ‘Without Form’
for Marion
It is noisiest here in this middle place,
Cries of despair and those of praise,
Yet you might close your eyes and begin to walk forward.
This must be how the first god did it.
It was back at the beginning, and he began to sing,
Though the light—which was there—showed nothing.
(2005)
Andrew Johnston, ‘Sol’
Solitude, solace, consolation—
sun in its onlyness
shines on us here,
cups the heart in a deep blue bowl.
Courtyard radio. Swallows in pairs.
You’ll have to let everything go
but it stays, and stays,
and is connected:
straight white line—no wind—a plane
flying, in the mind, towards the sun.
(2007)
Author Biographies
Sources include: Art New Zealand; Arts Foundation of New Zealand; Australian Dictionary of Biography; Cambridge Guide to Women’s Writing; Chris Bourke, Blue Smoke: The Lost Dawn of New Zealand Popular Music, 1918–1964; Dictionary of New Zealand Biography; Essays in New Zealand Literary Biography (Kotare: New Zealand Notes and Queries); Journal of New Zealand Literature; Journal of the Polynesian Society; Literary Encyclopedia; New Zealand Book Council; New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre; New Zealand Electronic Text Centre; New Zealand Herald; Official Website of the New Zealand Government; Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature; Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; Oxford History of New Zealand Literature; Playmarket; Te Ara—The Encyclopedia of New Zealand.
Arthur H. [Henry] Adams (1872–1936) was born at Lawrence in Otago. He graduated with a BA from Otago University College and, after a period as a journalist with the Evening Post in Wellington, moved to Australia where his first volume of poems, Maoriland, and Other Verses, was published in 1899. In 1906 Adams became editor of the Sydney Bulletin’s famous literary section, the ‘Red Page’, and in 1909 took over the editorship of the literary magazine The Lone Hand. He published novels as well as poetry, journalism, plays and operatic libretti. His career illustrates the close links between New Zealand and Australian literature in the late colonial period.
Fleur Adcock (1934–) was born in Papakura. She spent most of her childhood in Britain, returning to New Zealand after the Second World War. Adcock studied classics at Victoria University and worked as a librarian before leaving for England in 1963. Expatriation is the theme of several widely anthologised poems she wrote at this time. She has become a significant figure in the British literary establishment as a poet, anthologist, critic and translator but maintains her links with New Zealand and her place in the New Zealand canon.
Renato Amato (1928–64) was born in Italy. He fought briefly for the Italian army in 1944, and immigrated to New Zealand in 1954. Amato made friends among New Zealand literary circles, including James K. Baxter and Maurice Shadbolt, but found 1950s New Zealand uncongenial and intolerant. He appears as ‘Pietro Fratta’ in Shadbolt’s 1969 novel This Summer’s Dolphin. His sole publication, a collection of stories, The Full Circle of the Travelling Cuckoo, appeared posthumously in 1967.
Barbara Anderson (1926–) was born in Hastings. She graduated with a BSc from Otago University in 1947 and worked as a medical technologist and teacher in Hawke’s Bay and Wellington. She married a naval officer, and the life of a navy wife provides source material for several of her novels. In 1983 she attended Bill Manhire’s creative writing course which led to publication of short stories in literary journals and notice for her plays. Her first novel, Girls High, appeared in 1990. Anderson was part of the new wave of writers from Victoria University Press in the late 1980s and 1990s, though of an older generation.
Frank S. Anthony (1891–1927) was born near Gisborne, the child of a remittance man and a governess. He worked as a farmhand and a seaman, and joined the Royal Navy at the start of the First World War. He was wounded and used his rehabilitation grant to buy a farm. Anthony’s ‘Me and Gus’ stories appeared initially in local newspapers in the 1920s, and tell of the comic struggles of backblock farmers. Their success made him attempt a literary career in England, but this did not eventuate and he died there of tuberculosis in 1927. His mother arranged for the book-length publication of his works in the 1930s, and the 1950s radio adaptation of the stories made him a household name.
Sylvia Ashton-Warner [pseud. of Sylvia Warner] (1908–84) was born in Stratford, Taranaki. Her father was an invalid and her mother a schoolteacher. She went to Teachers’ Training College in Wellington, married and worked with her husband in a variety of rural schools in the Native School system. During this time Ashton-Warner was working on short stories and a novel, and developing the educational theories which would make her world-famous. Her children’s readers, based on a ‘key vocabulary’ reflective of the (generally Māori) children’s own experiences, were published by A.H. and A.W. Reed in 1953. Her novel Spinster (1958) was an international success and was made into a film (renamed Two Loves) in 1961 starring Shirley MacLaine and Laurence Harvey. Despite an almost cult-like following, her relationship with New Zealand society was unhappy, although her attempts to put her theories into practice in the USA and Canada suggest that her problems were personal as much as geographical.
[Donna] Tusiata Avia (1966–) was born in Christchurch and is of Sāmoan descent. Her first poetry collection, Wild Dogs Under My Skirt, based on her 2002 creative writing MA at Victoria University, appeared in 2004. She is a notable pe
rformer of her own work, and has written children’s books in the Sāmoan, Tongan, Cook Islands Māori, Niuean, Tokelauan and English languages.
Isabella E. Aylmer [Mrs J.E. Aylmer] is almost the author of New Zealand’s first novel—H. Butler Stoney’s Taranaki beat her by a year. Distant Homes; or the Graham Family in New Zealand (1862) was written without its author’s ever having been here, and based on family letters, which may explain why she conceives Mt Taranaki as an active volcano whose eruption devastates Wellington. Isabella was the wife of an army officer who was killed in the Crimean War, and her writing reflects the evangelical belief in the Christian conversion and consequent civilisation of the ‘savage’ races.
Hinemoana Baker (1968–) of Ngāti Raukawa, Ngāti Toa Rangatira, Te Āti Awa, Kāi Tahu, English and German descent is a Paekākāriki poet, musician and playwright. She has an MA in creative writing from Victoria University and has published two collections of poetry as well as being a notable performer of her own work.
David Ballantyne (1924–86) was born in Auckland. His great-grandmother Heni Te Kiri Karamu gave water to wounded soldiers on both sides at the battle of Gate Pā. He worked as a journalist in Auckland, publishing his first novel The Cunninghams to some international note in 1948. Four years later he moved to London, working as a journalist and establishing a reputation as a television playwright. He returned to New Zealand in 1966, again working as journalist. His major novel, Sydney Bridge Upside Down, appeared two years later. Despite early success, he struggled to make a living and his last years were blighted by alcoholism.
John Barr (1809–89) was born in Scotland and trained as an engineer on the Clyde where he married and had children. After financial difficulties, the family immigrated to Otago in 1852. In 1857 Barr and his wife established a homestead at Kaihiku which they called Craigilee (sometimes spelt ‘Craigielee’). In 1861 they moved back to Dunedin where his poetry, published in the Otago Witness and the Saturday Advertiser, and a book, Poems and Songs, Descriptive and Satirical, established him as an important figure in the new colony, publishing under the name ‘John Barr of Craigilee’. He was the laureate of the Caledonian Society and founder of the Burns Club, writing in broad Scottish dialect poems which celebrate Otago civic life, satirise local pretensions and hypocrisies and describe the struggles and triumphs of settler existence.
Alexander Bathgate (1845–1930) was born in Scotland and immigrated to New Zealand with his family in 1863. He worked as a banker, lawyer and company director, and at the same time wrote literary columns for newspapers such as the Otago Witness, the Saturday Advertiser and the Evening Star, using the Maoriland-style pseudonyms ‘He Kete’ and ‘Mararekareka’. Bathgate published a range of pamphlets, histories, travel guides and novels of colonial life. He was an early proponent of conservation and was involved in the establishment of parks and gardens in Dunedin, as well as being one of the founders of the Otago Art Gallery.
Amelia Batistich (1915–2004) was born in Dargaville. Her parents were immigrants from Dalmatia, then in the Austrian Empire, now part of Croatia. Batistich began writing in the 1940s—her first story was published in the racing magazine Best Bets; she later wrote for the Listener, Arena, Mate and the School Journal. Her short-story collection An Olive Tree in Dalmatia (1963), which tells of the adjustments and accommodations of immigrants to New Zealand, was derived from her own experiences and journals.
Blanche [Edith] Baughan (1870–1958) was born in England. She attended Royal Holloway College and was active in social work in the poorer parts of London. After travelling extensively, she settled at Clifton near Sumner, moving in 1930 to Akaroa on Banks Peninsula to a house named ‘The Ashram’. A collection of poems was published in 1908 and a short-story collection in 1912. Her acute observation of the landscape and her enthusiasm for tramping and mountain climbing are reflected in her popular 1908 essay The Finest Walk in the World (about the Milford Track) and a series of travel guides, collected in 1922 as Glimpses of New Zealand Scenery. Baughan’s subsequent output reflected her social concerns—especially prison reform—and her involvement in the Indian religious movement Vedanta.
Archibald Baxter (1881–1970) was born in Otago into the Scots diaspora and the New Zealand rural poor. As a young man he became a pacifist and a Christian socialist. A conscientious objector in the First World War, he was placed under military discipline and sent to France. His experiences are described in We Will Not Cease, published in 1939, although as most copies were destroyed in the London Blitz the work was not widely known until it was reprinted in 1968. After 1918, Baxter bought a farm and married Millicent Macmillan Brown, daughter of John Macmillan Brown, a founding professor at Canterbury University College, and Helen Connon, the first woman in the British Empire to take a degree with honours. Their second son was the poet James K. Baxter. During the Second World War Archibald Baxter and his wife lived in Dunedin and were leading figures in the pacifist Peace Pledge Union.
James K. [Keir] Baxter (1926–72) was born in Dunedin into a family deeply socially conscious and passionately literary. Baxter was prodigiously talented from his youth, writing striking poetry as a teenager and attracting the attention of Allen Curnow, who included him in his 1945 Book of New Zealand Verse. Baxter associated with the Wellington group of poets—notably Louis Johnson and Alistair Campbell—in the 1950s, taking an increasingly strong stance towards what he saw as the spiritual deadness of modern middle-class life. He married the writer J.C. (Jacquie) Sturm in 1948. Baxter converted to Catholicism in 1958 and visited India the following year, finding there an alternative to western materialism in the acceptance of poverty that he also found in Māori culture. In the late 1960s he attempted to live out his social idealism by founding a commune for those alienated from city life on Māori land at Jerusalem on the Whanganui River.
Abel Dottin William [Ensign] Best (1816–45) was educated at Sandhurst and joined the 80th Regiment charged with accompanying convict fleets to New South Wales. In 1840 he was posted to New Zealand. Based in Wellington, he recorded in his diary the turbulent early days of the colony immediately post-Treaty where his regiment’s presence was there as much to control settlers as local Māori. In 1841 he was moved to Auckland and took part in several expeditions in the central North Island in the company of William Cornwallis Symonds, Ernest Dieffenbach and Edward Shortland. Posted to Sydney in 1843, he returned to New Zealand with a section of his regiment in the wake of the Wairau incident and finally left New Zealand for India in 1844. He was killed in 1845 at the Battle of Ferozeshah, an engagement of the Sikh War.
[Mary] Ursula Bethell (1874–1945) was born in England, and came to New Zealand with her family when she was a baby. The family was well-to-do. Aged eleven, Bethell returned to England to complete her education in Oxford then Switzerland. She was a lifelong Anglican, and her faith informed both her poetry and her social work—while in London she was a member of an Anglican lay order, the Grey Ladies. She returned to Christchurch in 1924, settling at Rise Cottage on the Cashmere Hills; her garden there is the subject of many of her finest poems. She lived with her friend Effie Pollen whose death in 1934 was the occasion of a series of poems entitled ‘Memorials’, one written annually over six years.
Jenny Bornholdt (1960–) was born in Lower Hutt and lives in Wellington. She was an early graduate of Bill Manhire’s creative writing course at Victoria University, publishing her first collection of poetry in 1988. Bornholdt is also an anthologist, and has edited a number of collections with her husband, Gregory O’Brien. She was New Zealand Poet Laureate from 2005 to 2007.
Thomas Bracken (1841?–98) was born in Ireland. An orphan, he was sent to relatives in Australia as a child, immigrating to Dunedin around 1869. He became a journalist, starting a successful weekly newspaper which figured lively literary and political discussion. Bracken gained a seat in Parliament in 1883 on a progressive platform, supporting labour law reform and opposing the punitive actions of the government against Māori at Parihaka. His
poetry was published in Australia, New Zealand and England, and he was the author of what would become the New Zealand national anthem ‘God Defend New Zealand’. In 1876 John Joseph Woods won a competition to set the poem to music, and a Māori translation was made by T.H. Smith, a judge of the Native Land Court. Despite its popularity, ‘God Defend New Zealand’ did not displace ‘God Save the Queen’ as the official national anthem until 1977.
Charles Brasch (1909–73) was born in Dunedin; his father was a lawyer, his mother’s family owned the Hallensteins clothing company. He went to Oxford University, where he began publishing poetry and travelled in Europe. Brasch returned to New Zealand in 1931 and helped set up a new literary magazine, Phoenix. Declining to join the family business, he left for England but maintained his literary contacts while away, especially those associated with the Caxton Press in Christchurch, where his first collection of poems was published in 1939. He returned to New Zealand in 1945. Brasch was the founding editor of Landfall and his editorship from 1947 to 1966 remains known as the ‘classic’ phase of the journal.
Diana Bridge (1942–), poet and critic, was born in Wellington. She holds a PhD in Chinese literature from the Australian National University and has lived in London, Singapore, Beijing, Hong Kong, Delhi and Taipei, all of which are reflected in the settings and concerns of her poetry.
Anne Brontë (1820–49), sister of Emily and Charlotte, had no direct knowledge of New Zealand. The arresting image she uses in her 1847 novel Agnes Grey probably came from a family friend William Waring Taylor who emigrated to Wellington in 1841 on the Martha Ridgway carrying settlers to the new colony of Nelson.
James Brown (1966–) is a Wellington poet and short-story writer, a graduate of Bill Manhire’s creative writing programme and former editor of the literary journal Sport. He now works at Te Papa Tongarewa the Museum of New Zealand.
Robert Browning (1812–89), English poet, was a friend of Alfred Domett. The two were part of a group of young writers called ‘the Colloquials’ which met in London in the 1830s and early 1840s. It was always felt that Domett had the greater chance of literary success. When Domett immigrated to New Zealand in 1842 the two corresponded until Browning’s marriage and move to Italy. On Domett’s retirement to England in 1872 the two men renewed their friendship, and Domett’s journal from that time is an important source for Browning’s biographers. Domett is ‘Waring’ in Browning’s poem of the same name, and Browning was an early and enthusiastic reader of Domett’s poem Ranolf and Amohia.
The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature Page 144