Walking to Jutland Street is the impressive first book-length collection by up-and-coming Auckland-based poet Michael Steven. The title refers to Dunedin’s industrial wharf precinct where some of the poet’s friends shared a flat in 2010. A poem about friendship in the face of the other, ‘Walking to Jutland Street’ vividly recreates their evening ‘constitutional’ from the flat via the bridge over train tracks to the city and back, with its inebriated, surreal, sometimes nightmarish inhabitants. Other poems deliver snapshots of the human condition through bizarre personalities such as the subject of ‘Dropped Pin: Jollie Street’, ‘a man who proclaimed to function / best in a state close to coma’. Still others are tender love poems, travel poems (in 2016 the poet slept in the last bedroom of explorer Vasco da Gama), poems about family or childhood memory. A poet of gritty, day-to-day urban New Zealand reality (whether depicting teenage drug dealing, alcoholics or the night shelter), Steven is equally a writer steeped in literary tradition, Buddhist mysticism and world-historical narrative. His is a voice that aspires to capture quotidian experience or personality as a phenomenon implicitly of all times and places. In this pursuit, his literary cousins are Olds, Orr, Mitchell, Dickson, Johnson and Baxter.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 80

Dimensions: 150 x 230 mm

Publication Date: 20-03-2018

Featured Artists: Chris Corson-Scott, Heather Straka, Jenna Packer, Samuel Harrison Writers: Aimee-Jane Anderson-O’Connor, Nick Ascroft, Claire Baylis, Miro Bilbrough, Victoria Broome, Iain Britton, Owen Bullock, Christine Burrows, Brent Cantwell, Marisa Cappetta, Joanna Cho, Stephanie Christie, Makyla Curtis, Doc Drumheller, Mark Edgecombe, Lynley Edmeades, Johanna Emeney, Riemke Ensing, Ciaran Fox, Michael Gould, Shen Haobo, Paula Harris, René Harrison, Stephen Higginson, Jeffrey Paparoa Holman, Amanda Hunt, Anna Jackson, Ted Jenner, Anne Kennedy, Erik Kennedy, Jessica Le Bas, Wes Lee, Michele Leggott, Carolyn McCurdie, Robert McLean, Fardowsa Mohamed, Kavita Ivy Nandan, Emma Neale, Piet Nieuwland, Claire Orchard, Bob Orr, Jenny Powell, Chris Price, Helen Rickerby, Ron Riddell, L.E. Scott, Jo-Ella Sarich, Iain Sharp, Charlotte Simmonds, Peter Simpson, Tracey Slaughter, Laura Solomon, Barry Southam, Matafanua Tamatoa, Philip Temple, Dunstan Ward, Elizabeth Welsh, Sue Wootton, Mark Young, Karen Zelas.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 208

Dimensions: 165 x 215 mm

Publication Date: 01-05-2017

How does a city make a writer? Described by Fiona Kidman as a ‘ravishing, immersing read’, A Strange Beautiful Excitement is a ‘wild ride’ through the Wellington of Katherine Mansfield’s childhood. From the grubby, wind-blasted streets of Thorndon to the hushed green valley of Karori, author Redmer Yska, himself raised in Karori, retraces Mansfield’s old ground: the sights, sounds and smells of the rickety colonial capital, as experienced by the budding writer. Along the way his encounters and dogged research – into her Beauchamp ancestry, the social landscape, the festering, deadly surroundings – lead him (and us) to reevaluate long-held conclusions about the writer’s shaping years. They also lead to a thrilling discovery. This haunting and beautifully vivid book combines fact and fiction, biography and memoir, as Yska rediscovers Mansfield’s Wellington, unearthing her childhood as he goes, shining a new lamp on old territory. "It’s not enough to say I immensely enjoyed A Strange Beautiful Excitement … it’s simply splendid." – Dame Fiona Kidman "… the best account I have ever read of Wellington and Karori as they were in Mansfield’s day … Vivid and vigorous, it is a pleasure to read." – Kathleen Jones, KM biographer

Bind: hardback

Pages: 296

Dimensions: 150 x 198 mm

Publication Date: 24-07-2017

In the mid-19th century a woman's place in society - or sphere - was dictated by very different standards and expectations. A Woman's Sphere is the story of Florence Pettigrew's marriage to Charles Spurway, the son of a transported convict and known as 'Cornstalk' - a name commonly given to children who grew taller and stronger than their convict parents. Florence, a free woman and talented artist, works in her father's store in Hobart Town, Tasmania. One day, with the jingle of the shop door bell, Charles appears, wanting to buy a gift for his grandfather, a remittance man. Gradually, a relationship, not encouraged by her father, develops and leads to marriage. Initially idyllic, the marriage encounters difficulties stoically borne by Florence. Charles, on the other hand, does not accept his lot and following his dreams and wanting to leave his 'cornstalk' label behind, decides to move to New Zealand. In the Wairarapa township of Masterton he sets up as a stock and station agent. Florence has no choice but to move with him. Trapped in a marriage she can't escape, Florence is consoled by her art, and her involvement in the temperance movement and the battle to gain women the vote. There are tragic consequences.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 216

Dimensions: 140 x 210 mm

Michael Harlow’s poems are small detonations that release deeply complex stories of psychological separations and attractions, of memory and desire. Frequently they slip into the alluring spaces just at the edges of language, dream and gesture, as they carefully lower, like measuring gauges, into the ineffable: intimations of mortality, the slippery nature of identity, longing, fear … Harlow is a poet with such a command of music, the dart and turn of movement in language, that he can get away with words that make us squirm in apprentice workshops or bad pop songs – heart, soul – and make them seem newly shone and psychically right. The work is sequined by sound, rather than running its meaning along the rigid rails of metre and end rhyme. The sway and surge of various meanings in the phrasing, and the way sense trails and winds over line breaks: this movement itself often evokes the alternating dark and electric energy of feelings like love, loss and the pain of absence. This is a beautifully honed new collection.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 100

Dimensions: 150 x 235 mm

Publication Date: 22-08-2016

After establishing a poetic presence on the literary scene in the early 1960s, Dunedin’s Alan Roddick published his first collection, The Eye Corrects: Poems 1955–1965, in 1967. A mere 49 years later comes the sequel, Getting it Right. Poet C.K. Stead writes in Shelf Life (AUP, 2016) that he has always been a great admirer of the economy and the quiet, sharp wit of [Roddick’s] writing … Alan Roddick is a ‘cool’ poet, a temperament that seems reserved, controlled, decent, funny and intelligent; a craftsman not a showman, with a fine musical ear, whose work is dependable and of the highest order. And as well as witty and clever work, there are poems that catch moments of deep feeling; and equally of exhilaration, such as the ten-year-old Alan standing up on the seat, his head through the sunroof of his father’s car that is cruising downhill, ‘pushing 40’ with the engine off to save petrol, ‘drunk with the scent of heather and whin / that airy silence …’ Alan Roddick is writing as well as any New Zealand poet currently at work on the scene. It is wonderful to have him back – something to celebrate!

Bind: paperback

Pages: 100

Dimensions: 150 x 230 mm

Publication Date: 20-09-2016

A late 19th century tale of triumph over obsession and humiliation. From award-winning writer, Karyn Hay, The March of the Foxgloves promises to be essential summer reading. LONDON, 1893, and Frances Woodward is tormented by the restrictions of her puritanical father and the cruelties of 19th century narcissist, Benedict Hunt. Having meted out a particularly creative form of revenge upon Hunt, Frances transcends the social norms of the late-Victorian era and travels alone to the far-flung colony of New Zealand, where she is forced to look beyond the establishment life seemingly pre-ordained for her. Falling in with other artists and non-conformists, and inspired by the revolution in thinking brought about by heroic literary figures and social reformers of the time, Frances forges a new path of her own making. Karyn Hay is an iconic New Zealand media personality, and award-winning author. Her first book Emerald Budgies, described as ‘a darkly comic tale of disintegration and revenge... Prozac Nation meets Crash!’, won the NZSA Hubert Church Best First Book Award in the Montana New Zealand Book Awards. Karyn is also a Frank Sargeson Fellow. She lives in West Auckland.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 400

Dimensions: 127 x 203 mm

Publication Date: 01-12-2016

Featured Artists: Elizabeth Thomson, Nick Austin, James Robinson, Simon Kaan Writers: Michalia Arathimos, Ruth Arnison, Nick Ascroft, Airini Beautrais, Tony Beyer, Peter Bland, Victoria Broome, Sam Clements, Jennifer Compton, David Coventry, Carolyn Cossey, Ben Egerton, Riemke Ensing, Scott Hamilton, Lynn Jenner, Jan Kemp, Brent Kininmont, Jessica LeBas, Therese Lloyd, Olivia Macassey, Ria Masae, Kirsten McDougall, Leslie McKay, Caoimhe McKeogh, Robynanne Milford, Alice Miller, Michael Morrissey, Elizabeth Morton, Heidi North-Bailey, Claire Orchard, Maris O’Rourke, Jenny Powell, M.D. Rann, Rebecca Reader, Nicholas Reid, Elspeth Sandys, Kerrin P. Sharpe, Elizabeth Smither, Michael Steven, John Summers, Leilani Tamu, Chris Tse, Sue Wootton, Karen Zelas Reviews: Lawrence Jones on Bloomsbury South: The arts in Christchurch 1933–1953 by Peter Simpson; Vaughan Rapatahana on Coming Rain by Stephen Daisley; Michael Morrissey on The Antipodeans by Greg McGee; Christopher Ward-Greene on Love as a Stranger by Owen Marshall; James Norcliffe on Beside Herself by Chris Price and Fits and Starts by Andrew Johnston; Sally Blundell on A History of New Zealand Women by Barbara Brookes; Edmund Bohan on Outcasts of the Gods by Hazel Petrie and Ka Ngaro Te Reo by Paul Moon; David Herkt on Lost and Gone Away by Lynn Jenner

Bind: paperback

Pages: 208

Dimensions: 165 x 215 mm

Publication Date: 21-11-2016

This volume of Charles Brasch’s journals covers the years from late 1945 to the end of 1957, when the poet and editor was aged 36 to 48. It begins with his return to New Zealand after World War II to establish a literary quarterly to be published by the Caxton Press. The journals cover the first decade or so of his distinguished editorship of Landfall, a role that brought Brasch into contact with New Zealand’s leading artists and intelligentsia. His frank and often detailed descriptions of these people – including Frank Sargeson, A.R.D. Fairburn, Keith Sinclair, Eric McCormick, James Bertram, J.C. Beaglehole, Maria Dronke, Fred and Evelyn Page, Alistair Campbell, Bill Oliver, Toss and Edith Woollaston, Denis Glover, Allen Curnow, Leo Bensemann, Lawrence Baigent, Ngaio Marsh, Colin McCahon, James K. Baxter, Janet Frame, Ruth Dallas and many others – are among the highlights of the book. Unmarried and longing for intimacy, Brasch also writes with great candour about his relationships with Rose Archdall, Rodney Kennedy and Harry Scott, revealing a side of himself that has not been known about before. Central to Brasch’s life was the vocation of poetry. He writes movingly about his own work, and also about his love of nature and the outdoors, including lively descriptions of walking the Milford and Routeburn tracks. The book ends with his visit to Europe in 1957, which confirmed his sense that New Zealand had become for him ‘a centre & a world’. A lengthy introduction by Peter Simpson and other editorial apparatus guide the reader through this engrossing material.

Bind: hardback

Pages: 660

Dimensions: 170 x 245 mm

Publication Date: 01-05-2017

Much of Time of the Icebergs was written while David Eggleton was a Writer-in-Residence at the Michael King Writers Centre in Auckland in 2009. These are poems about the world we live in, tracing a dystopian present 'hurtling globalisation's highway' where 'Google tells Google that Google saves'. As he says, 'I think of it as a collection for browsing and discovering things: soundscapes, seascapes, landscapes, contemporary politics and contemporary people, histories, traditions, and other things besides.' In this time of winebars and infotainment, 'Ngati Cappucino and Ngati Bogan' stalk the streets bent beneath hoodies and 'boxy four-wheel-drives plane through the wet' piloted by 'yummy mummies'. Titles of poems reflect the absurdities of 21st century existence: 'Kate Winslet Promotes a Credit Card' riffs off an ad in the New Yorker, while 'Not for Human Consumption' and 'Twenty Second Century' hint at the ecological chaos of the modern world. Name-droppers, debt-dodgers, ghettoised gods and 'Vern Acular, that good keen bloke' all make an appearance, as does the lost five-cent coin. Poems set in Suva, Sydney, Christchurch, Auckland and Dunedin locate this book firmly in the South Pacific. Eggleton traverses the country: from Cantabrian landscapes of 'a geology sculpted into fists' and Dunedin 'tipped out of a colonial toy-box' to North Island summer idylls where you could 'follow a jiggle-string of beach pulled taut by the soaraway kite of blue sky'. Nationality and 'kiwiness' are under investigation. This is no mere intellectual exercise as through it all thrums the steady beat of life.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 88

Dimensions: 140 x 210 mm