Book of Cohen
David Cohen on Leonard Cohen
Steele Roberts Publishers
ISBN 978-0-947493-88-2
188 pp. RRP $29.99.

Book of Cohen is a singular volume with multiple objectives. “This was always going to be a work by one Cohen (that would be me) on another Cohen (that would be Leonard)”. “I’ve always been Cohen-mad” the author confides, “But there was another Cohen lurking in the picture as well.”

The title echoes Leonard’s biblical and liturgical inclination – Book of Longing, The …

Blood Ties
New and Selected Poems : 1963- 2016
by Jeffrey Paparoa Holman
Canterbuy University Press.
167pp. RRP $ 25.
ISBN 978-1-927145-88-3

Dylan Junkie
by Jeffrey Paparoa Holman
Makaro Press Hoopla Series
54 pp. RRP $ 25.
ISBN 978-0-9941378-0-7

It is a harsh fact that we live in a world where there is far more published poetry than people willing or able to read it. Over the past fifty years poetry has ceased to be a common currency. It is …

Love as a Stranger
by Owen Marshall
Vintage
ISBN 978-1-77553-857-8
RRP. $ 38.00. 289 pp.

The Antipodeans
by Greg McGee
Upstart Press
ISBN 978-1-927262-03-0
RRP: $ 38.00. 352 pp.

Murray Bramwell

In his captivating new novel, Love as a Stranger, Owen Marshall immediately greets the reader with portents. The epigraph quotes the 17^th century dramatist and poet, Pedro Calderon de la Barca : “When love is not madness, it is not love.” And the opening sentence in the …

Essential New Zealand Poems:
Facing the Empty Page
Selected by Siobhan Harvey, James Northcliffe
and Harry Ricketts
A Godwit Book, Random House, New Zealand
ISBN 978-1-77553-459-4
RRP: $ 45.00. 319 pp.

Murray Bramwell

So what makes poems essential ? In their introduction to this most appealing collection, the three editors mull the problem of their own title. Actually it is not their title, but a reprise of an earlier Godwit collection also called Essential New Zealand Poems. That was …

Two Girls in a Boat
by Emma Martin
Victoria University Press
ISBN 978-0- 86473-893-6
RRP. $ 35.00. 197 pp.

Tough
by Amy Head
Victoria University Press
ISBN 978-0-86473-698-7
RRP: $ 28.00. 79 pp.

Tales from the Netherworld
by Jo Randerson
Steele Roberts Aotearoa
ISBN 978-1-877577-88-8
RRP. $. ??? 115 pp.

Murray Bramwell

One of the many pleasures of reading collections of short stories is the variety of ways in which a writer can explore the local – things, places and …

The Little Enemy
by Nicholas Reid
Steele Roberts Aotearoa
ISBN 978-1-877577-51-2
RRP. $29.95. 94 pp.

A Man Runs into a Woman
by Sarah Jane Barnett
Hue & Cry Press
ISBN 978-0-473-21399-2
71 pp.

The Same as Yes
by Joan Fleming
Victoria University Press
ISBN 978-0-86473-698-7
RRP: $ 28.00. 79 pp.

Murray Bramwell

These three collections are all debut publications and each reminds us of the diversity in current writing. They vary greatly in perspective, tone, technique, assumed knowledge and raise …

Parallel Worlds

Travesty
by Mike Johnson
Graphic Art by Darren Sheehan
Titus Books
titus@snap.net.nz
RRP. $ 39.00

Fosterling
by Emma Neale
Vintage
RRP. $ 29.99

Wulf
by Hamish Clayton
Penguin NZ
RRP. $ 30.00

Like many futuristic nightmares, the naming of the nihilistic Gaia colony of Travesty is both literal and metaphoric. Mike Johnson’s grim tale begins in a crummy tenement called the Rathouse where we meet the seedy principals of this sci-noir yarn. They have names reminiscent of William …

South-West of Eden
A Memoir 1932
By C.K. Stead
University of Auckland Press
RRP $ 45.
ISBN 9781869404543

It was T.S. Eliot who wrote, in “East Coker” – “In my beginning is my end.” In a quite different, earlier poem, he produced the variant line – “our beginnings never know our ends”, adding the notion of intention to that of destination in the word “end”. In South-West of Eden, C.K. Stead’s richly textured meditation on the first 23 – …