Orchid Tierney and David Howard
Cracked mirrors

Orchid Tierney and David Howard

'Time is worn into beaks': Robyn Maree Pickens

Image courtesy of Robyn Maree Pickens
Image courtesy of Robyn Maree Pickens

Robyn Maree Pickens is a PhD candidate at the University of Otago, Dunedin, Aotearoa/New Zealand. Her writing has appeared in Art + Australia Online, Turbine|Kapohau, The Pantograph Punch, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, Art New Zealand, Art News, The Physics Room Annual, Enjoy Gallery’s Occasional Journal, and exhibition catalogues. Currently she is an art reviewer for the Otago Daily Times, and was Blue Oyster Art Project Space’s 2016 summer writer-in-residence on Quarantine Island Kamau Taurua.

Her output directs an ecocritical gaze, building its power from clausal fragments that frequently feel like complete sentences yet push and pull against settlement. Observations are quickly situated; discomforted by their larger implications, they remain critically thought-through. Her work is sharp yet layered, folding over and inward like an origami sculpture: Donna Haraway (the tension between “affinity” and “identity”), patterning and its relation to access, the nonhuman operation of time and its linguistic mimesis — these all ensure a strong formal architecture despite Pickens’s shifting eye. Her work is an exciting arrival and departure for Aotearoa/New Zealand poetry.

July 12, 2017

The grass never stops

Lynley Edmeades on Vana Manasiadis

Vana Manasiadis
Vana Manasiadis

Vana Manasiadis’s interest and use of history and mythology — grounded in her own biography — is a welcome strain to New Zealand poetry. Her reference to Greek and classical traditions, and her borrowing of forms from her poetic forebears, lets her cultivate a poetic voice relatively peculiar to these shores.[1] She holds an MA in Creative Writing — the standard currency for emerging poets in the English-speaking world — but her work has a scope much greater than the contemporary institution’s remit.

April 13, 2017

Human Language: The Poetry of Michael Steven

Catherine Dale

Michael Steven. Photo credit: Greta Anderson.
Michael Steven. Photo credit: Greta Anderson.

Unlike many New Zealand poets of his generation, Michael Steven is not part of the literary establishment. Steven has been writing and performing poetry in New Zealand “in fits and starts”[i] for more than twenty-five years, but has not pursued an MA in creative writing or yet published a monograph with a university press.

March 24, 2017

Messages from the Antipodes

Ted Jenner

Ted Jenner, 'Writers in Residence and other captive fauna.'
Ted Jenner, 'Writers in Residence and other captive fauna.' Auckland: Titus Books, 2009.

In New Zealand the poetic generation of 1946 surveyed the boundary fences, then jumped over them. From the late 1960s this generation has set both the poetic and the critical parameters for general and specialist discussion. Career-long attention has been given to Ian Wedde, Bill Manhire, and Sam Hunt, who were all born in a year of notable publications such as The quest: words for a mime play (Charles Brasch), Jack Without Magic (Allen Curnow), The Rakehelly Man & Other Verses  (A.R.D.

March 10, 2017