Orchid Tierney and David Howard

Cracked mirrors

Note on John Dickson’s poems

Ian Wedde

John Dickson
John Dickson

John and I talk on the phone about every second week. Invariably, he’s got suggestions for what I would enjoy reading and sometimes for what I might like listening to. I’ve benefitted from these amicable suggestions for years and have never repaid the favour. This is because I can’t match John’s capacity to read, let alone his appetite for very long books.

'Strange Self-Congratulations, Flat Whites': Some notes on Bill Manhire

Robert McLean

Black painting XV, from ‘Malady,’ a poem by Bill Manhire, 1970, by Ralph Hotere.
Black painting XV, from ‘Malady,’ a poem by Bill Manhire, 1970, Dunedin, by Ralph Hotere. Purchased 1971. ©Te Papa. CC BY-NC-ND licence. Te Papa (1971-0024-2).

By international standards all New Zealand publishing is small press publishing. The country is home to only 4.73 million people. If a significant proportion of the adult population supports the authors of cookery and gardening books, such enthusiasm rarely extends to buying titles by novelists, playwrights, and poets.

'reflecting each other as obliquely as in cracked mirrors'

Lola Ridge and poetry’s refractions in Aotearoa

Lola Ridge
Lola Ridge

Some time ago I was traversing through Papers Past, an archive of digitised newspapers managed by the National Library of New Zealand, when I fortuitously encountered six poems by Lola Ridge in the New Zealand Illustrated and The New Zealand Tablet.