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2011-10-25T08:30:00.014+13:00

[The Chartres Labyrinth]

Bibliography

This is a bibliographical site which I maintain for my own convenience, as a one-stop shop for recording new publications and reviews - mainly because it's much more convenient to copy information from here than to have to retype it every time I have to compile another cv or book-list.

Anyone else who wants to is welcome to use it in the same way. Having spent so much time trying to reconcile contradictory bibliographies of the authors I'm interested in, I think the value of a single, authorised list of publications is indisputable. It's not so much conceit as good sense.

- Jack Ross

Powertool Records (c.2007)
[photograph: Scott Hamilton]

Books:
1. City of Strange Brunettes. ISBN 0-473-05446-9. Auckland: Pohutukawa Press, 1998.
2. Nights with Giordano Bruno: A Novel. ISBN 0-9582225-0-9. Wellington: Bumper Books, 2000.
3. Chantal’s Book. ISBN 0-473-08744-8. Wellington: HeadworX, 2002.
4. Monkey Miss Her Now & Everything a Teenage Girl Should Know. ISBN 0-476-00182-X. Auckland: Titus Books, 2004.
5. Trouble in Mind. Titus Novella Series. ISBN 0-9582586-1-9. Auckland: Titus Books, 2005.
6. The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis: A Novel. ISBN 0-9582586-8-6. Auckland: Titus Books, 2006.
7. To Terezín: A Travelogue. Afterword by Martin Edmond. Social and Cultural Studies, 8. ISSN 1175-7132. Auckland: Massey University, 2007.
8. EMO: A Novel. ISBN 978-1-877441-07-3. Auckland: Titus Books, 2008.
9. Kingdom of Alt. ISBN 978-1-877441-15-8. Auckland: Titus Books, 2010.

Chapbooks:
1. Guillaume Apollinaire. Aubade. Translated by Jack Ross. Illustration by Mark Haddon. Edinburgh: Drummond Press, 1987.
2. Killing Time. Auckland: Perdrix Press, 1997.
3. Ezra Pound’s Fascist Cantos (72 & 73) together with Rimbaud’s “Poets at Seven Years Old.” Translated by Jack Ross. Auckland: Perdrix Press.
4. A Town Like Parataxis. Photographs by Gabriel White. ISBN 0-473-07104-5. Auckland: Perdrix Press, 2000.
5. The Perfect Storm. Video by Gabriel White. ISBN 0-473-07350-1. Auckland: Perdrix Press, 2000.
6. The Britney Suite. Auckland: Perdrix Press, 2001.
7. A Bus Called Mr Nice Guy. ISBN 0-473-10526-8. Auckland: Perdrix Press, 2005.
8. Love in Wartime. Wellington: Pania Press, 2007.
9. Papyri: Love poems & fragments from Sappho & elsewhere. ISBN 978-0-473-12397-0. Auckland: Soapbox Press, 2007.
10. Minotaur. Translated by Jack Ross. Auckland: Pania Press, 2009.
11. Je donne à mon espoir. Translated by Jack Ross. Auckland: Pania Press, 2009.
12. The Return of the Vanishing New Zealander. ISBN 978-0-9864507-6-1. Dunedin: Kilmog Press, 2009.
13. The Argo & The Wahine. Story by Bronwyn Lloyd / Poems by Jack Ross. Auckland: Pania Press, 2009.
14. Silhouette. Artwork by Bronwyn Lloyd. Auckland: Pania Press, 2009.
15. Scenes from The Puppet Oresteia. Artwork by William T. Ayton. ISBN 978-0-473-18881-8. Rhinebeck, NY: Narcissus Press / Auckland: Perdrix Press, 2011.

Edited - Books:
1. [your name here:] Life Writing. Edited by Jack Ross. Introduction by Mary Paul. ISBN 0-473-09551-3. Massey University: School of Social and Cultural Studies, 2003.
2. Golden Weather: North Shore Writers Past & Present. Poems edited by Jack Ross / Prose edited by Graeme Lay. ISBN 0-908561-96-2. Auckland: Cape Catley, 2004.
3. Kendrick Smithyman, Campana to Montale: Versions from Italian. Edited by Jack Ross. ISBN 0-476-00382-2. Auckland: The Writers Group, 2004.
  - Kendrick Smithyman, Campana to Montale: Versions from Italian. 2004. Edited by Jack Ross & Marco Sonzogni. Introduction by Marco Sonzogni. Essay by Jack Ross. ISBN-13: 978-88-7536-264-5. Transference Series. Ed. Erminia Passannanti. Novi Ligure: Edizioni Joker, 2010.
4. Where Will Massey Take You? Life Writing 2. Edited by Jack Ross. ISBN 0-473-09551-3. Massey University: School of Social and Cultural Studies, 2005.
5. Classic New Zealand Poets in Performance. Edited by Jack Ross. Poems selected by Jack Ross and Jan Kemp. ISBN 1-86940-367-3. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2006.
6. Myth of the 21st Century: An Anthology of New Fiction. Edited by Tina Shaw & Jack Ross. ISBN 0-7900-1098-4. Auckland: Reed Publishing (NZ) Ltd, 2006.
7. Contemporary New Zealand Poets in Performance. Edited by Jack Ross and Jan Kemp. ISBN 978 1 86940 395 9. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2007.
8. Orange Roughy: Poems & Stories for Tazey. Edited by Bronwyn Lloyd & Jack Ross. ISBN 978-0-473-13179-1. Auckland: Pania Press, 2008.
9. Home & Away: Life Writing 3. Edited by Kathryn Lee & Jack Ross. ISBN 978-0-473-13539-3. Massey University: School of Social and Cultural Studies, 2008.
10. New New Zealand Poets in Performance. Edited by Jack Ross. Poems selected by Jack Ross and Jan Kemp. ISBN 978 1 86940 4093. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2008.
11. 11 Views of Auckland. Edited by Jack Ross & Grant Duncan. Preface by Jack Ross. Social and Cultural Studies, 10. ISSN 1175-7132. Albany: Massey University, 2010.
12. Leicester Kyle. Koroneho: Joyful News Out Of The New Found World. Edited with an Introduction by Jack Ross. Preface by Ian St George. ISBN 978-0-9876604-0-4. Auckland: The Leicester Kyle Literary Estate / Wellington: The Colenso Society, 2011.

Edited - Magazines, Coursebooks &c. [38]
1. The Pander 3-9. ISSN 1174-4030 (1998-1999)
2. Spin 33, 36, 39, 42 & 45. ISSN 0113-8227 (1999-2003)
3. brief 24-32. ISSN 1175-9313 (2002-2005)
4. A brief index: 1995-2003 / 2003-2005. ISSN 1175-9313. Auckland: The Writers Group, 2003 / 2005.
5. Landfall 214. ISBN 978 1 877372 93 3. (November 2007)
6. Rowan McCormick, Writers of Passage. Edited by Jack Ross. Preface by Mary Paul, with an Afterword by Eleanor Rimoldi. Social and Cultural Studies, 9. ISSN 1175-7132. Auckland: Massey University, 2008.
7. Poetry NZ 38. ISSN 0114-5770. (March 2009)
8. Bravado 19 (July 2010). ISSN 9-771176-339003 [guest fiction editor].

Contributions to Anthologies, Catalogues &c. [23]

Multimedia & Internet [46]

Pamphlets [26]

Poems [123]

Short Stories [19]

Articles [44]

Reviews [97]

•

Chronology

Papers [84]

Readings [112]

•

[Classical Labyrinth]

Koroneho (2011)

2011-10-15T09:14:00.029+13:00

Cover illustration & design: Ian St George

Leicester Kyle. Koroneho: Joyful News Out Of The New Found World. Edited with a Introduction by Jack Ross. Preface by Ian St George. ISBN 978-0-9876604-0-4. Auckland: The Leicester Kyle Literary Estate / Wellington: The Colenso Society, 2011. ii + 110 pp.

Title Page

Contents:

Ian St George: Preface

Jack Ross: Introduction

Koroneho:

Section 1: Earina alba

Section 2: Bulbophyllum ichthyostomum

Section 3: Dendrobium lessonii

Section 4: Corysanthes hypogaea

Section 5: Microtis longifolia

Section 6: Caladenia variegata

Section 7: Gastrodia leucopetala

Section 8: Microtis papillosa

Section 9: Orthoceras caput-serpentis

Section 10: Pterostylis patens

Section 11: Prasophyllum variegatum

Section 12: Thelymitra purpureo-fusca

Section 13: Pterostylis subsimilis

Section 14: Pterostylis tristis

Afterword (2001)

Leicester Kyle
[photograph: Jack Ross]

Blurb:

Koroneho:
Joyful News Out Of The New Found World.

Leicester Kyle's Koroneho is an epic poem about botany. Taking as his subject matter the life and explorations of pioneer missionary, printer, and naturalist William Colenso (1811-1899) – whose Māori name was “Koroneho” – Kyle expertly weaves letters, historical details, and the language of botanical description into a strangely compelling mixture (a little like that other long Modernist poem “containing history”: Ezra Pound’s Cantos).

http://leicesterkyle.blogspot.com/
http://leicesterkyle1.blogspot.com/

•

The Rev. Leicester Kyle (1937-2006) was in many ways a fitting match for the object of his fascination, Colenso. Trained as a botanist, he entered the Anglican Church in his twenties, only to take early retirement in his fifties after converting to a new religion: poetry. His fascination with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E School poetics was succeeded by a more relaxed sense of the indigenous and anecdotal in the work written after his move to Millerton on the West Coast in the late 1990s.

Edited by Jack Ross. Preface by Ian St George. ISBN 978-0-9876604-0-4. Auckland: The Leicester Kyle Literary Estate / Wellington: The Colenso Society, 2011.

Abstract:

When poet, priest and environmental activist Leicester Kyle died in 2006, he asked poet David Howard and myself to act as his literary executors. In accordance with the trust he placed in us, a website has now been set up which we hope will (eventually) contain all of his extant work in electronic form, together with critical material. The first major unpublished text I posted online was Kyle’s patchwork verse epic Koroneho, about the life and work of pioneering nineteenth-century botanist and missionary William Colenso.

This print publication of the poem has been undertaken at the instigation of Ian St George of the Colenso Society, who has also contributed a preface and a cover design. It consists of a reading edition of the online text, edited with an introduction by me. The design of the book is intended to evoke Colenso’s own paperback publications, from his pioneer printing press in Paihia.

Online Texts:

Leicester Kyle Index

Leicester Kyle Texts

Samples:

The Imaginary Museum

Available:

Leicester Kyle Literary Estate
c/o 6A Hastings Rd
Mairangi Bay
Auckland 0630
New Zealand

The Colenso Society Inc.
c/o 22 Orchard St.
Wadestown
Wellington 6012
New Zealand

Leicester Kyle

Reviews & Comments:

Debbie Ormsby, "News and Events." School of English and Media Studies Homepage (16/11/11):

New Publication: Leicester Kyle. Koroneho: Joyful News Out Of The New Found World by Jack Ross

•

Scenes from The Puppet Oresteia (2011)

2011-05-02T09:46:00.015+12:00

[Book design: William T. Ayton]

Scenes from The Puppet Oresteia. Text by Jack Ross / Artwork by William T. Ayton. ISBN 978-0-473-18881-8. Rhinebeck, NY: Narcissus Press / Auckland: Perdrix Press, 2011. 24 ink drawings. 44 pp.

Contents:

I – Iphigenia, or Happy Families
Chorus 1 - Cursed with prophecy
Scene 1: The Palace at Mycenae
Chorus 2 - I ran through the wood
Chorus 3 - Little girl lost

II – Cassandra, or Payback is a Bitch
Chorus 4 - Joy lives with those
Scene 2: The Palace at Mycenae
Chorus 5 - Cursed with second sight
Chorus 6 - See how Apollo

III – Orestes, or Never say Never
Chorus 7 - The labour pains
Scene 3: The Seashore at Tauris
Chorus 8 - There she goes
Chorus 9 - Drops of holy water

Epilogue
Chorus 10 - Noise is like flame

[Back cover]

Blurb:

What would happen if two children decided to put on the Ancient Greek Oresteia in their own puppet theatre? With their (recently divorced) parents as characters? Casting themselves as Iphigeneia, sacrificed by her father for a favourable wind, and Orestes, the murderer of his mother? What kind of bloodbath might come out of that?

This modern retelling of the classic trilogy in words and pictures is a collaboration between New Zealand poet Jack Ross and US-based British artist William T. Ayton.

A Narcissus Press / Perdrix Press co-production

Abstract:

This is a translation project which builds on the framework of Papyri (2007), my selection of poems from Sappho. Here I re-imagined the two Iphigenia plays of Euripides alongside Aeschylus’s Agamemnon to create a new drama with contemporary overtones. The collaboration with Bill Ayton came about from a chance email exchange on my Papyri blog, but has led to an exploration of the burgeoning world of e-books and e-publishing.

Online Texts:

Lulu.com

Papyri

Samples:

Flickr

Perdrix Press

The Imaginary Museum

William T. Ayton Art Blog

William T. Ayton

[William T. Ayton: A Strange Nest]

Available:

Lulu.com
[as a File Download ($US 2.99)
or Print-on-demand publication ($US 15.00)]

Narcissus Press
Rhinebeck
NY
USA

Perdrix Press
6A Hastings Rd
Mairangi Bay
Auckland 0630
New Zealand

RRP: $US 15 / $NZ 20

[William T. Ayton: The Seashore at Tauris]

Reviews & Comments:

William T. Ayton, "Scenes from The Puppet Oresteia." William T. Ayton Art Blog (2/5/11):

In recent weeks, I've been working on a collaboration with New Zealand poet Jack Ross. The result is a chapbook entitled "Scenes from The Puppet Oresteia", based on the classic Greek trilogy of tragic plays by Aeschylus, updated into a more contemporary setting, that of a play performed by children in their puppet theater, whilst still paying homage to the original. The chapbook is 44 pages, with 24 ink drawings (21 of them brand new for this project) by myself. The book will be available soon, as a co-production between Perdrix Press (Ross) and Narcissus Press (the small press my wife Diana & I founded) ...

•

Campana to Montale (2010)

2010-11-16T13:04:00.020+13:00

[cover design: Gennaro Fusco]

Kendrick Smithyman. Campana to Montale: Versions from Italian. 2004. Edited by Jack Ross & Marco Sonzogni. Introduction by Marco Sonzogni. Essay by Jack Ross. ISBN-13: 978-88-7536-264-5. Transference Series. Ed Erminia Passannanti. Novi Ligure: Edizioni Joker, 2010. 244 pp.

Contents:

Introduction
Making the List: Last but not Least
(Marco Sonzogni)

Essay
The Poem Within: Kendrick Smithyman the Poet-Translator
(Jack Ross)

Poets:

[For a full list of the poems included, consult the 2004 edition]
Dino Campana
(20 August, 1885 – 1 March, 1932)

Born in 1885, near Faenza; died of septicaemia at Castel Pulci in 1932. Before being committed in 1918 to the mental hospital where he died, Campana’s life was characterised by compulsive wandering, tormented love affairs, and extreme disdain for the literary establishment. Major works: Canti Orfici (1914); Canti orfici e altre liriche (1928). A great deal of his work appeared posthumously: Inediti (1942), Taccuino (1949); Canti orfici e altre scritti (1952); Lettere (1958); Taccuinetto fiorentino (1960); Opere e contributi (1972).

Sandro Penna
(June 12, 1906 – January 21, 1977)

Born in Perugia in 1906; died in Rome in 1977. A somewhat isolated figure in modern Italian poetry, Penna is generally described as the one working-class poet among the intellectuals of the Hermetic school. Major works: Una strana gioia di vivere (1956); Croce e delizia (1958); Un po' di febbre (1973); Tutte le poesie (1970); Stranezze (1976); Il viaggiatore insonne (1977); Confuso sogno (1980).

Nelo Risi
(April 21, 1920- )

Born in Milan in 1920. A qualified doctor, but writer by vocation, he spent most of World War II in Russia, and was subsequently interned in Switzerland. His work concerns itself mainly with “the dilemma of the individual in an age of mass-consciousness.” Major works: L'opere e i giorni (1941); L’esperienza (1948); Polso teso (1956); Pensieri elementari (1961); Dentro la sostanza (1966); Amica mia nemica (1976); Poesie scelte 1943-1975 (1977); I fabbricanti del 'bello' (1982); Le risonanze (1987); Mutazioni (1991); Il mondo in una mano (1994); Altro da dire (2000); Ruggine (2004); Di certe cose. Poesie 1953-2005 (2006); Né il giorno né l'ora (2008).

Giuseppe Ungaretti
(February 8, 1888 – June 2, 1970)

Born in Egypt, at Alexandria, in 1888; died in Milan in 1970. He served as an infantryman in World War I, an experience which confirmed him in his vocation as a poet. With Montale and Quasimodo, one of the “big three” of twentieth-century Italian poetry. Major works: Il porto sepolto (1917); Allegria di naufragi (1919); L'allegria (1931); Sentimento del tempo (1933); Il dolore (1947); La terra promessa (1950); Il taccuino del vecchio (1960); Vita d’un uomo (1969).

Leonardo Sinisgalli
(March 9, 1908 – January 31, 1981)

Born in Montemurro in 1908; died in Rome in 1981. His background in physics and graphic design led him to formulate a poetry of detached understatement, in opposition to the frenzied aesthetics of his contemporaries. Major works: Cuore (1927); Ritratti di macchine (1935); Quaderno di geometria (1935); Vidi le muse (1943); Fiori pari, fiori dispari (1945); Belliboschi (1948); La vigna vecchia (1952); L'età della luna (1962): Poesie di ieri (1966); Mosche in bottiglia (1975); Dimenticatoio (1978).

Alfonso Gatto
(July 17, 1909 – March 6, 1976)

Born in Salerno in 1909; died in a road accident near Orbetello in 1976. He was imprisoned in Milan in 1934 for opposition to the Fascist regime, and was active in the Resistance during World War II, experiences which informed much of his later poetry. Major works: Isola (1932); Poesie (1941); La spiaggia dei poveri (1944); Nuove poesie (1949); La forza degli occhi (1954); La madre e la morte (1960); Rime di viaggio per la terra dipinta (1969); Desinenze (1977); Poesie (1998); Tutte le poesie (2005).

Vittorio Sereni
(July 27, 1913 – February 10, 1983)

Born in Luino, Lago Maggiore, in 1913; died in Milan in 1983. Fought as an infantry officer in Greece and Sicily, where he was taken prisoner. His initial adherence to Hermeticism was succeeded by a more realistic approach to war and post-war austerity. Major works: Frontiera (1941); Diario d’Algeria (1947); Un polvere d'anni di Milano (1954); Gli strumenti umani (1965); Poesie scelte 1935-1965 (1973); Stella variabile (1981); Tutte le poesie (1986); Il grande amico. Poesie 1935-1981 (1990); Poesie (1995).

Camillo Sbarbaro
(January 12, 1888 – October 31, 1967)

Born in Santa Margherita, Liguria, in 1888; died at Spoleto in 1967. Generally seen as an adherent of the turn-of-the-century Crepuscular school, Sbarbaro’s melancholic self-absorption in fact has more in common with later poets of disillusionment such as Montale or T. S. Eliot. Major works: Resine (1911); Pianissimo (1914); Truccioli (1920); Liquidazione (1928); Rimanenze (1956); Primizie (1958).

Luciano Erba
(September 18, 1922 - August 3, 2010)

Born in Milan in 1922; died in Milan in 2010. Scholar, translator and critic, Erba’s elaborately ironic undercutting of traditional poetic language and attitudes helped him to build up a biting commentary on post-war Italian values. Major works: Linea K (1951); Il bel paese (1955); Il prete di Ratanà (1959); Il male minore (1960); Il prato più verde (1970); Il nastro di Moebius (1980); Il cerchio aperto (1983); Il tranviere metafisico (1987); L'ippopotamo (1989); Il variar del verde (1993); L'ipoteci circense (1995); Negli spazi intermedi (1998); Nella terra di mezzo (2000); Poesie 1951-2001 (2002); Si passano le stagioni (2003); Un po' di Repubblica (2005); Remi in barca (2006).

Mario Luzi
(October 20, 1914 – February 28, 2005)

Born in Castello, Tuscany, in 1914; died in Florence in 2005, shortly after being elected Italian Senator-for-life. An early exponent of the hermetic movement, whose motto “letteratura come vita” (literature as life) dominated Italian literature in the 1930’s, his later work is less liable to assume the capacity of poetry to palliate suffering. Major works: La barca (1935); Avvento notturno (1940); Quaderno gotico (1947); Onore del vero (1957): Il gusto della vita (1960); Tutte le poesie (1979); Per il battesimo dei nostri frammenti (1985); Viaggio terrestre e celeste di Simone Martini (1994); Dottrina dell'estremo principiante (2004).

Giorgio Orelli
(May 25, 1921 - )

Born in Airolo in 1921. He studied Italian literature with Gianfranco Contini at Fribourg, then went to teach in Bellinzona, where he has been living since 1945. He is considered by many the greatest poet of Italian Switzerland. Major works: Né bianco né viola (1944); Poesie (1953); Nel cerchio familiare (1960); L'ora del tempo (1962); Sinopie (1977); Spiracoli (1989) Rückspiel-partita di ritorno (1998); Il collo d'anitra (2001); Sagt es den Anseln-Ditelo ai merli (2008).

Elio Pagliarani
(May 25, 1927 - )

Born in Viserba, near Rimini, in 1927. Teacher, editor, journalist, Pagliarini’s poetry attempts to replace the conventions of the Romantic lyric with a neo-realist but linguistically complex presentation of the lives of ordinary people. Major works: Cronache e altre poesie (1954); La ragazza Carla e altre poesie (1962); Lezione di fisica e Fecaloro (1968); Rosso Corpo Lingua oro pope-papa scienza-Doppio trittico di Nandi (1977); Esercizi platonici (1985); La ballata di Rudi (1995).

Lucio Piccolo
(October 27, 1901 - May 26, 1969)

Born 1903 in Palermo. Died in 1969 at his Sicilian property at Capo d’Orlando. Like his more famous cousin Tomasi di Lampedusa, lived out of the mainstream of Italian cultural life. Major works: Canti barocchi (1956); Gioco a nascondere (1960); Plumelia (1967).

Eugenio Montale
(October 12, 1896 - September 12, 1981)

Born in Genoa in 1896; died in Milan in 1981. His poetry, perhaps the most influential in twentieth-century Italian literature, constantly circles back to his childhood on the coast of Liguria. Largely self-educated, he lost his job as an editor in 1938 as a result of anti-fascist opinions, and supported himself afterwards with occasional journalism and translation. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1975. Major works: Ossi di seppia (1925); Le occasioni (1939); La bufera ed altro (1956); Satura (1971); Diario del '71 e del '72 (1973); Quaderno di quattro anni (1977); Altri versi (1980); L'opera in versi (1980).

Salvatore Quasimodo
(August 20, 1901 - June 14, 1968)

Born in Modica in 1901; died in Milan in 1968. His Nobel prize for literature in 1959 was awarded mainly for the wartime poems collected in Giorno dopo giorno [Day after day] (1943-46), an advance on the austere Hermeticism of much of his early work. The life of the Sicilian countryside and the classical Mediterranean past are two interests which constantly resurface in his poetry. Major works: Acque e terre (1930); Òboe sommerso (1932); Erato e Apòllion (1938); Ed è subito sera (1943); Giorno dopo giorno (1947); La vita non è sogno (1949); Il falso e vero verde (1954); La terra impareggiabile (1958): Tutte le poesie (1960); Dare e avere (1966).

Blurb:

Kendrick Smithyman's Campana to Montale. Versions from Italian – an impressive anthology of Italian Modernist poetry in English translation – is not only a celebration of poetry translation but also of poetry itself. Smithyman's translations – or, rather, versions, as he defined them – keep company with those penned by virtuosi of the word like Samuel Beckett and T.S. Eliot; Derek Mahon and Paul Muldoon; Charles Wright and John Updike; Billy Collins and Bill Manhire; and, of course, the godfather of poetry translation, Robert Lowell. Campana to Montale. Versions from Italian is an essential part in the jigsaw puzzle - Atua Wera, Last Poems, Imperial Vistas Family Fictions, and now the magnificent online edition of Collected Poems 1943-1995 - which is gradually revealing to us the true extent of the lifework of one of New Zealand's greatest poets.

Kendrick Smithyman, poet and critic, was born in Te Kopuru, in the far north of New Zealand, on October 9th, 1922. He attended school and teachers college in Auckland before wartime service in first the Artillery, then the RNZAF, from 1941 to 1945. His first poems were published in the 1940s, and he came to be regarded as one of the country's most complex yet prolific poets. He was also the author of the first full-length critical book on New Zealand poetry, A Way of Saying (1965). In 1963 he joined the Auckland University English Department, and he worked there as a Senior Tutor until his retirement in 1987. He won the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry with his 1985 book Stories About Wooden Keyboards. In 1986 he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the University of Auckland, and in 1990 he received an OBE. He died on December 28th, 1995.

Jack Ross, poet and literary translator, is Lecturer in English at the School of Social and Cultural Studies, Massey University (Albany Campus).

Marco Sonzogni, poet and literary translator, is Senior Lecturer in Italian at the School of Languages and Cultures, Victoria University of Wellington.

ISBN: 88-7536-264-5

Є20.00 £17.50 $28.00

Abstract:

For the most part, this re-issue of my 2004 edition of this set of translations from the Italian Modernists by NZ poet Kendrick Smithyman reproduces the text of the original publication. However this second edition, co-edited with Dr Marco Sonzogni of Victoria University, includes corrections to the text of the poems, as well as a greatly expanded, 5,000-word version of my original introduction, entitled “The Poem Within: Kendrick Smithyman the Poet-Translator”. It also includes an essay by Italian scholar Sonzogni, comparing (favourably) Smithyman’s abilities as a translator with some of the others in the field.

The original edition of this book got a very favourable critical reception in New Zealand from (among others) C. K. Stead (““I know what I’ll be reading this summer.” Sunday Star-Times (5/12/04): C8). It was thanks to Dr. Sonzogni’s contacts in his home country, Italy, that we were able to issue it in this new form, in a series devoted to literary translation and foreign-language poetry.

Online Text:

Joker Edizioni

Samples:

The Imaginary Museum

Available:

Edizioni Joker
via Crosa della Maccarina 28/B
15067 Novi Ligure (AL)-ITALIA
Tel/Fax 0143.322383
www.edizionijoker.com
info@edizionjoker.com

Reviews & Comments:

Alistair Paterson. "Campana to Montale: Versions from Italian." Books and Magazines in Brief. Poetry NZ 42 (2011): 108.

This is a relatively large collection of poems not so much translated as restructured by the author from the work of 15 Italian poets who were writing and publishing throughout a large part of the twentieth century. The collection was complete in 1993 when Smithyman submitted it unsuccessfully to Auckland University Press and then Carcanet in Manchester. AUP and Carcanet's loss was a distinctive gain for the Writers Group, which should congratulate itself on acquiring and publishing such a fine set of adaptations from the work of very important Italian poets. Jack Ross has done a wonderful job of putting the poems together and thus offering us a truly impressive book.

Anna Forsyth. "Book Review: Campana to Montale by Kendrick Smithyman." Best Light Communications (4/5/11):

I must say straight away, that the depth of thought and care which has been given to this book is touching. When you can feel the love, you can’t help but linger for just a bit longer, out of respect for the author and editors if nothing else.

I don’t speak any Italian, and aside from in the introduction, there is not too much for me to have to grapple with. Having the original language alongside would have been nice, but reading the English versions of the poems places the poem in a new context.

Ross makes the point that ‘translating poetry is, strictly speaking, impossible.’ It is more of an envisioning and a fresh context that invites the reader into the world of the original.
...
A great insight into an important school of poetry that deserves access.

David Herkt. "Summer's Last Cicada." Landfall Review Online (1/7/11):

Campana To Montale is a substantial and noteworthy addition to the corpus of Italian poetry in English. It is focused, yet comprehensive within those bounds. It gives a clear insight into more than half a century of writing. It is not the work of a dilettante. But Smithyman’s texts also produce far more questions than have been answered, even in the excellent essays by Ross and Marco Sonzogni that introduce and accompany the Edizione Joker edition.

Was such a labour really the product of a casually caused reaction? Was Smithyman’s involvement with Italian modernist poetry and poetics merely a matter of chance? Was it sustained purely by a hunt-and-peck exercise in dictionary translation much like doing a cryptic crossword in two languages? No matter how beguiling these questions might be, currently we have no real answers beyond the body of work. And such questions also avoid an obvious observation: these poems are some of Smithyman’s finest work.

Farrell Cleary. "A Kiwi voice for Italian poetry." Società Dante Alighieri di Auckland Newsletter (Ottobre / October, 2011) 7:

While some may look askance at the prospect of reading 200 pages of Italian poetry “Englished” by someone who knew no Italian, Marco Sonzogni provides convincing reassurance that Smithyman’s versions can hold their own as translations with anything previously published.

He draws our attention to Smithyman’s transformation of Eugenio Montale’s L’anguilla/The Eel, where “flogging through the deeps”, “from creek to stream” and “a buried stump” could be describing eeling expeditions near Dargaville. In fact, Smithyman’s painstaking work with dictionaries and other earlier translations produces surprisingly accurate English versions.

David Groves. "The Italian job." New Zealand Books: A Quarterly Review vol. 21, no. 3, issue 95 (Spring 2011) 27:

It seems a useful working hypothesis that the extraordinary flowering of Smithyman's third period – with the domestic Imperial Vistas Family Fictions and the regional (but not national or provincial) Atua Wera – is directly related to the loosening up of discourse and the crossing of temporal, spatial and cultural boundaries that he practised imaginatively in his translations. In addition, Montale's switch from the dense imagistic mode of his earlier epiphanies to his later sardonic manner, and the shift of Quasimodo from his earlier intricate and allusive compression to the more relaxed style and social themes of his later work, may have exercised a particular influence on Smithyman's own development. If so, this book is an important contribution to the study of one of our finest poets.

•

11 Views of Auckland (2010)

2010-08-25T08:37:00.017+12:00

Cover image: Graham Fletcher /
Cover design: Brett Cross & Ellen Portch

11 Views of Auckland. Edited by Jack Ross & Grant Duncan. Preface by Jack Ross. Social and Cultural Studies, 10. ISSN 1175-7132. Albany: Massey University, 2010. ii + 210 pp.

Contents:

Cluny Macpherson, "Auckland’s Pacific Narratives"

Graeme MacRae, "The Bay that Was, a Park that Isn’t and the City that Might Have Been"

Ann Dupuis, "Shutting the Gates: Auckland’s Urban Development in Transition?"

Warwick Tie, "Between Itself: The Political Economy of the Metropolis"

Eleanor Rimoldi, "Auckland City: Public Life and Civil Society"

Isabel Michell, "Auckland City: Becoming Places"

Jennifer Lawn, "Soft-boiled in Ponsonby: The Topographies of Murder in the Crime Fiction of Charlotte Grimshaw and Alix Bosco"

Peter Lineham, "The Religious Traditions of the North Shore: Pluralism and Unity"

Jack Ross, "The Stokes Point Pillars"

David Ishii, "Immigration settlement: Never Just about Language"

Grant Duncan, "The Making of the Super City"

Samples:

Social and Cultural Studies

Available:

Dot Cavanagh
School Receptionist
College of Humanities and Social Sciences
Massey University
Private Bay 102 904
North Shore Mail Centre
Auckland

RRP: $NZ 20 (+ $2 postage & packing)

Reviews & Comments:

Graeme Beattie, "11 Views of Auckland." Beattie's Book Blog (7 February 2011):

The College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Albany Campus, Massey University, are happy to invite you to celebrate the publication of 11 Views of Auckland: An anthology of essays by members of the College, Volume 10 in our ongoing Monograph Series "Social and Cultural Studies."

The book will be launched by Massey University’s Vice-Chancellor, The Hon Steve Maharey, at a special launch price of $15 [RRP: $20], in the Study Centre Staff Lounge, East Precinct, Albany Campus, Auckland, on Thursday 17th February from 5.00-6.30 p.m.

Jennifer Little, "Urban myths and marvels evoked in Auckland essays." Massey University Website. (18 February 2011):

Murders, motorways and migrants are some of the subjects of a new book, 11 Views of Auckland, by Albany-based academics from the University’s College of Humanities and Social Sciences.
...
Each is a unique exploration on an aspect of Auckland’s past or present, its complexities and contrasts, penned by academics from sociology, history, English, linguistics, public policy, anthropology and political studies at the University’s Albany campus.

Sarah Coddington, "Lecturer wants poems written on bridge pillars." North Shore Times (Tuesday, 15 March, 2011): 30:

It seems poems gracing pillars of the mighty Auckland Harbour Bridge and telling tales of North Shore's past were never meant to be.

Massey University English lecturer Jack Ross spent many hours collating poems for a Shore art-based project that never went ahead.
...
"The first criterion to qualify for a spot was you had to be dead. It was very hard to choose poets and you needed a diversity of people with a connection to the Shore," he says.

[Sarah Coddington, "Lecturer wants poems written on bridge pillars"
(North Shore Times (Tuesday, 15 March, 2011): 30]

•

Authors Graeme MacRae, Grant Duncan, Jack Ross, Eleanor Rimoldi, David Ishii, Cluny Macpherson and Warwick Tie at the book launch yesterday. (Absent were Ann Dupuis, Jennifer Lawn and Isabel Michell)
[17 February, 2011]

Complete Review:

Jennifer Little. "Urban myths and marvels evoked in Auckland essays." Massey University Website. (18 February 2011):

Murders, motorways and migrants are some of the subjects of a new book, 11 Views of Auckland, by Albany-based academics from the University’s College of Humanities and Social Sciences.

Edited by English lecturer Dr Jack Ross and public policy lecturer Associate Professor Grant Duncan, the book is printed and published by the University.

The essays are by no means gushing endorsements for the metropolis – home to an estimated 1.25 million people, or about a third of the nation’s population.

Each is a unique exploration on an aspect of Auckland’s past or present, its complexities and contrasts, penned by academics from sociology, history, English, linguistics, public policy, anthropology and political studies at the University’s Albany campus.

That the writers all live and work in Auckland is pertinent to the spirit of these essays, which evoke personal experiences and insights within the framework of their particular discipline.

Thoughtful commentaries on urban experiences include Dr Isabel Michell’s Auckland City: Becoming Places. She describes the pleasures and perils of being an inner city pedestrian who suffers “near hits, noise and air pollution, and the annoying experience of what might be called pedestrianas interruptus: the sudden cessation of footpath in favour of road.”

She reflects on the need for “life in or between buildings”, lamenting the lack of appealing public spaces through which a diverse muster of humanity can flow or congregate.

English and Media Studies lecturer Dr Jennifer Lawn delves into crime fiction set in Auckland as pathway into the links between real crime, place and urban experience in Soft-boiled in Ponsonby: The Topographies of Murder in the Crime Fiction of Charlotte Grimshaw and Alix Bosco.

Real crimes, reported and sensationalised in the media, can provide a backdrop or echo for imagined ones. "Grimshaw's Auckland is scarcely fit for human habitation; it is waterlogged, slimy, rotting, hostile to the scale and pace of the human frame – yet curiously sublime, even daemonic...” she writes.

Anthropologist Dr Graeme MacRae traces a fascinating history of his neighbourhood in Freeman’s Bay in The Bay that Was, a Park that Isn’t and the City that Might Have Been. He traces its evolution from community-oriented council housing to hub of commercial development and victim of “social cleansing.”

Sociologist Associate Professor Ann Dupuis reflects on the emergence of gated communities, and Dr Warwick Tie explores the link between aesthetics and economics in relation to downtown Auckland’s glass-walled Metropolis building as a symbol of precarious corporate ethos in Between Itself: The Political Economy of the Metropolis

Associate Professor Grant Duncan adds a poetic touch from the vantage point of a bus passenger in his essay The Making of the Super City. "The bus climbs steeply to the apex of the Bridge, a place where every traveller gets a fleeting million-dollar view, and this ride impresses itself as one of the great ways to experience the brutal velocities, the pounding sensations and the beautiful vistas from unexpected windows that create the way the hapless denizen takes part in the life of the city – just another body going along with the city's great lava-flows of traffic that congeal and contest within the channels designed for them by anonymous planners."

He asks the reader to look beyond the potentially "sleep-inducing boredom" that the subject of local government may invoke to the basic relevance of urban policy making; ""How do people, politics and social trends shape the places we inhabit and the ways we experience life, move about and get things done in the city?"

The book is the 10th monograph in a series started by the former School of Cultural and Social Studies.

Dr Ross’ quirky essay describes his involvement in a thwarted art project to engrave poetry on Auckland’s harbour bridge supports. He says he hopes the book will provoke readers with its “truthful depiction of how the city seems to each of us right now,” that will “grow in value as Auckland’s various futures unfold and interlock.”

Vice-Chancellor Steve Maharey, who launched the book, praised its rich, diverse content and described it as “a time capsule of Auckland today that will become a valuable reference point for how the city changes and evolves.”

[Graham Fletcher: "Untitled,"
from Lounge Room Tribalism (2009-2010)]

•

Kingdom of Alt (2010)

2010-08-24T08:49:00.027+12:00

Cover image: "Model forest", by Bronwyn Lloyd

Kingdom of Alt. Short Stories and a Novella by Jack Ross. ISBN 978-1-877441-15-8. Auckland: Titus Books, 2010. [iv] + 240 pp.

Contents:

Marginalia

Trauma: Journal
Haiku Diary
The Isle of the Cross
The Purloined Letter
Notes found inside a text of Bisclavret
Finding His Stash
Before the Disaster

Coursebook found in a Warzone: A Whodunit

Cover design: Brett Cross

Blurb:

Is writing about staying on the sidelines, or getting involved - marginal observation, or "skyline operations" (Auden)? This book offers a series of takes on the possibility of a truly engaged literature. Not all the conclusions it comes to are entirely pessimistic.

"You'll all have your own story about how you first encountered the magic kingdom of Alt. As a teenager growing up in the depths of the Auckland suburbs, I believe that discovery saved my life."
- Roger Horrocks

Titus Books
ISBN 978-1-877441-15-8

Abstract:

This is a collection of seven short stories, together with a longer, 100-page novella. The stories are grouped in a section called “Marginalia,” since they're all (more or less) concerned with the subject of notes and jottings written in the margins of more conventional texts. In the case of “Notes found inside a text of Bisclavret,” the frame is a dual-text translation of an Old French poem about a werewolf by Marie de France, which is adorned by various notes telling a somewhat more contemporary story. The other stories are concerned with diaries and journals (“Trauma: Journal” and “Haiku Diary”); a long-lost novel by Melville (“The Isle of the Cross”); a forged letter by Baudelaire, and its links to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (“The Purloined Letter”); a heap of print-outs of internet pornography, (“Finding His Stash”); and an examination report on a Masters Thesis (“Before the Disaster”). All the stories (with the exception of “Finding His Stash”) have been previously published (in part or in full) in periodicals or online.

Online Texts:

Banned Books

Crisis Diaries

Samples:

Notes found inside a text of Bisclavret

Available:

Titus Books
PO Box 102
Waimauku
West Auckland
New Zealand
titus@snap.net.nz
http:/titus.books.online.fr/

RRP: $NZ 40.00 (+ $2 postage & packing)

Reviews & Comments:

Scott Hamilton, "Literature in the Age of Twitter." Reading the Maps (17 September 2010):

The two books being launched by Titus next Thursday at the Alleluya Cafe on Auckland's K Rd are both, in quite different ways, testaments to Brett [Cross]'s style of publishing. Kingdom of Alt is a volume of short stories by Jack Ross, a writer Titus has supported since its inception. With their baroque structures, explicit and sometimes bizarre sex, extreme but seldom gratuitous violence, and innovative use of page layout, variations in font, and illustrations, Jack's books have all too often been easy for reviewers to ignore or to misunderstand. They have also frequently been expensive to publish. Titus has nevertheless stood by Jack, and there are signs now that the critical tide might be turning. It is certainly gratifying for me to see that Paula Green and Harry Ricketts' handsome new survey, 99 Ways into New Zealand Poetry, devotes considerable attention to Jack's work.

Bronwyn Lloyd, "Jack Ross's Kingdom of Alt." Launch speech at Alleluya Café (Thursday 23rd September 2010):

Jack’s maniacal tendencies are well known to those of us who know him so it should come as no surprise to his friends to learn that in the process of researching his novella which features the story of a man who teaches two literature courses in the midst of a war-torn city that Jack invented two entire university papers, ‘Crisis Diaries’ and ‘Banned Books’, complete with an anthology of readings, extensive lecture notes, and a fully navigable blog for each course that you as readers can access via the links on the copyright page of Kingdom of Alt to add to your reading experience ...

Elmar Ludwig, "Review of Kingdom of Alt." brief 41 (2010): 103-5.

It's a technique that Ross often employs, this layering or intercutting of narratives, and as a reader you find yourself becoming attuned to a number of vibrations, like someone listening to a complex piece of music while also being aware of the sound of a floor-sander in a room next door.
...
It is a sad fact that today Universities are no longer centres of learning but money generating machines, producing graduates for the job market ... One wishes that these coldly rational institutions would crumble, their foundations eroded by termites with diamond-tipped mandibles. Ross is such a termite, both subversive and industrious in his literary activities, I would willingly sign up for his fictitious courses if I were not about to unplug my computer and travel to other shores.

Lisa Samuels, "What Happens Next: Review of Kingdom of Alt." Landfall Online (1 April, 2011).

If Jack Ross has not read J.G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition, someone should get it for him. Kingdom of Alt has some of the anarchic qualities of that confrontational work, but they are more dispersed: Kingdom of Alt is a collection of tales and takes which present entanglements of real-life events and imaginary fictions in order to score or scarify with traumas those experiencing the real live events. The narrators include variously: a twenty-something female university student, a thirtyish divorcee taking evening poetry classes and constructing weird ‘death films’ out of video fragments, a middle-aged man, Jack Ross himself as the speaking author, as well as other points of view, sometimes fragmentary, sometimes unified.

Rowan McCormick, "Kingdom." [Email received 20/5/11]:

When I was a young fellow I used to read (and re-read) Mad Magazine. First, I'd buy them. Then, I found that I could take them from the rubbish bin behind the Paper Plus in Milford. The humour went from Satire to Slapstick to Ironic to the plain Bizarre - it was all there, and you could move around, reading different things depending on your whim. A lot of it was above me - some 'in jokes' and the like - American Humour that I didn't quite get. I remember getting a Cracked magazine once, and flicking back and forth between two pages, each page referring the reader to the other, each advertising a Square Egg Maker. 'How can I get my hands on one of these - where is the effing order form?', I wondered.

Reading at the launch
(photograph: Cerian Wagstaff)

Complete Essay:
[reprinted by permission]

Bronwyn Lloyd. "Launch speech: Jack Ross's Kingdom of Alt." (23/9/10):

In a launch speech made by Roger Horrocks for Jack’s first collection of short stories, Monkey Miss her Now, published in 2004 by Raewyn Alexander’s imprint Danger Publishing, Roger said:

You’ll all have your own story about how you first encountered the magic kingdom of Alt. As a teenager growing up in the depths of the Auckland suburbs, I believe that discovery saved my life.

By this he meant the kingdom of Alternative fiction, film, art, underground comics and zine culture. When Jack heard Roger’s words he identified with them immediately and decided that this would be the title for his next collection of stories. And here it is.

I’m very pleased to have been asked to launch Jack’s latest book Kingdom of Alt, published by Titus Books. Kingdom of Alt is a collection of seven stories and a new novella, ‘Coursebook found in a Warzone: A Whodunit’.

The thing about alternative fiction is that you can’t neatly sum it up in a short speech and you shouldn’t even try. The reader is a collaborator, so what I might have to say about this book or any of Jack’s other books for that matter, will be completely different from what any other reader will have to say about it.

Jack’s books are writerly texts and readers need to be prepared to participate – to take part in a kind of performance and to go on an adventure where they might end up anywhere, everywhere and nowhere all at once. To quote Roger Horrocks again:

Once a character [in Jack’s stories] has walked out the door, he or she can end up anywhere in space, time or language.

As a reader you are encouraged to tag along, but I can tell you, you can find yourself in some pretty strange and disturbing places, so consider yourself warned.

As an initiate of Jack’s Kingdom of Alt for the past four years with my own sumptuously decorated chamber inside the palace, I’ve utilized a number of strategies and techniques when reading Jack’s books, particularly his trilogy of novels dealing with the subjects of insomnia, amnesia and blindness.

Multicoloured post-it notes were used to chart all the dismembered stories in Nights with Giordano Bruno, and I nearly composed a novel of my own on the side trying to nut out all the clues and ciphers so that I could play the sealed "game for one player" that was tucked inside the back of each copy of the book.

Pink clothes pegs and a retractable washing line were essential for reading the back to front text in my misprinted copy of The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis, and a magnifying glass came in very handy for reading the palimpsest text running beneath the main text of EMO.

So I’ve definitely embraced the idea of collaboration when it comes to Jack’s books although generally I don’t respond to his texts in words, but instead find myself making little models out of paper and card: a pop-up minotaur, a labyrinth made out of cardboard wine-bottle dividers, a concertina castle interior where a werewolf lives made from a fold-down six-pack carton, or, in this case, a 3D paper forest made with photocopies of illustrations by Gustave Doré.

I guess what I’m trying to tell you is that there are very few signposts. You need to find your own way into Jack’s Kingdom of Alt, but I will give a couple of tips to any brave new initiates who want to cross the drawbridge.

Don’t be put off by weird page layouts like this, from ‘Coursebook found in a Warzone: A Whodunit’:

Jack’s maniacal tendencies are well known to those of us who know him so it should come as no surprise to his friends to learn that in the process of researching his novella which features the story of a man who teaches two literature courses in the midst of a war-torn city that Jack invented two entire university papers, ‘Crisis Diaries’ and ‘Banned Books’, complete with an anthology of readings, extensive lecture notes, and a fully navigable blog for each course that you as readers can access via the links on the copyright page of Kingdom of Alt to add to your reading experience.

Another thing to note is that you should be suspicious of the subtitle of the novella, ‘A Whodunit’, because you may not necessarily be able to solve this whodunit and you might even find yourself wondering just what it is that got done!

The subject of marginalia unites the collection of seven stories that come before the novella in the book. There’s a little mouse called Max who hovers at the edge of one character’s tormented imagination before the spiders and bloodless corpses take over. There are the hidden clues in an allegedly counterfeit letter written by Baudelaire to his mother, and the scorching marginal notes written by an angry wife in the pages of her husband’s pornography collection. There are the creepy handwritten notes of a young anorexic woman in the margins of a poem about a wolfman cruelly treated by his wife, and in the story ‘The Isle of the Cross’ Jack takes the idea of marginalia one step further, with his character writing in the margins of a non-existent text, Herman Melville’s great lost manuscript ‘The Isle of the Cross’.

I’ll leave you to puzzle the rest out for yourselves when you buy a copy of the book and I’d now like to invite Jack to read a passage from ‘The Isle of the Cross’.

The author in repose
(courtesy: Emma Smith)

•

Silhouette (2009)

2009-12-26T09:21:00.017+13:00

Cover Image & design: Bronwyn Lloyd

(December 25, 2009) Silhouette. Auckland: Pania Press, 2009. 7 pp. [gift edition].

Contents:

Silhouette

Available:

Pania Press
2/ 5 Hastings Rd
Mairangi Bay
North Shore City 0630
Auckland

RRP: $NZ75 (postage included within NZ)

Samples:

Mosehouse Studio

Reviews & Comments:

Jurgen Wegner, “The Pania Press.” Brandywine Bookman’s Repository for Australia & New Zealand #30 (January 2011): 9-10:

Another favourite technique is collage and a further work by Ross produced last year, Silhouette, is also comprised of unique copies with each illustrated with a collage of vintage fabric samples as well as fashion cuts from issues of 1950s Ladies home journal ...

•

The Argo & The Wahine (2009)

2009-12-22T09:09:00.013+13:00

Cover image & design: Bronwyn Lloyd

The Argo & The Wahine. By Bronwyn Lloyd & Jack Ross. Auckland: Pania Press, 2009. 24 pp. [signed edition of 30 copies].

Contents:

Jack Ross:
Argo
Hiding the Lunch
The Darkness
Mayday
Before the Storm

Bronwyn Lloyd:
The Last Letter

Samples:

Mosehouse Studio

The Imaginary Museum

•

The Return of the Vanishing New Zealander (2009)

2009-09-16T11:38:00.013+12:00

Book design: Dean Havard

Front cover

The Return of the Vanishing New Zealander. ISBN 978-0-9864507-6-1. Dunedin: Kilmog Press, 2009. 20 pp.

Title page

Contents:

I ♥ NZ
NZ Golf (and English) Academy
Boi-Boi on Karaoke
Language School Picnic
Journey to the West
Index
Mysteries: A Christmas Poem
In the Days of The Lord of the Rings
A Question of Faith
Bonfire Gothic

Samples:

Kilmog Press

The Imaginary Museum

Back cover

Available:

Kilmog Press
Po Box 1562
Dunedin
New Zealand

RRP: $NZ35

Back dustjacket

Reviews & Comments:

Nga-Atawhainga Creagh, "Collector's Edition." School of Social and Cultural Studies, Massey University (4/11/09):

Fans of Dr. Jack Ross, lecturer in Creative Writing at the Albany campus and author of three published novels, two books of short stories and several books of poems, will be delighted to know he has published a new chapbook of poems titled The Return of the Vanishing New Zealander. According to Jack, the limited edition collection works through the complexities of being a “'New Zealander' in an increasingly multi-cultural and polyglot country." He welcomes the changes in society, "whereas a lot of other people seem to see them as some kind of erosion of integrity and identity.”

The book is rather special as it is Jack's first hardback, a rarity amongst New Zealand publishers. It can be bought from Parsons Bookshop on Wellesley St in Auckland city. Jack would like to make special mention that Parsons are an amazing supporter of the local arts scene, and stock virtually every New Zealand author and artist, maverick or mainstream: “Go in there and spend some money!” Alternatively, the book can be ordered directly from the publisher at Kilmog Press in Dunedin, whose website also features a sample poem.

Congratulations Jack! And we will look forward to more published work in the future.

Alistair Paterson, "Books and Magazines in brief: The Return of the Vanishing NEW ZEALANDER, by Jack Ross (Kilmog Press, PO Box 1562, Dunedin, 20 pp., $35)." Poetry NZ 40 (2010): 108:

The Return of the Vanishing New Zealander, by Jack Ross, is a beautifully presented, hand-covered chapbook, produced in the classic manner with a marvellously designed title page and wonderful end papers. Its title is derived from Leslie Fiedler’s The Return of the Vanishing American – a writer who was adopted by the Blackfoot tribe and known as ‘the wild man of American criticism’. One could say something of the latter in regard to Jack Ross who in his own way can sometimes be thought of as a wild man of New Zealand Literature – the twelve poems in the present collection reinforce this view yet at the same time offer writing that’s invariably ‘right’ with every word of every line put together as the poetry insists and requires. With such wonderful writing and superbly skilful printing and binding, this is a book for the collector – a publication not to be missed!

•

Je donne à mon espoir (2009)

2009-05-19T12:01:00.020+12:00

Book design: Bronwyn Lloyd

Je donne à mon espoir. Auckland: Pania Press, 2009. 8 pp. [limited edition of 21 copies].

Contents:

Je donne à mon espoir (after Apollinaire)

Samples:

Mosehouse Studio

Available:

Pania Press
2/ 5 Hastings Rd
Mairangi Bay
North Shore City 0630
Auckland

RRP: $NZ25 (postage included within NZ)

•

Book design: Bronwyn Lloyd

(November 23, 2008) Je donne à mon espoir: A Translation from Apollinaire. Auckland: Pania Press, 2008. 8 pp. [gift edition].

Contents:

Je donne à mon espoir ...

•

Minotaur (2009)

2009-05-19T10:37:00.014+12:00

Book design: Bronwyn Lloyd

Minotaur. Auckland: Pania Press, 2009. 4 pp. [limited edition of 21 copies]

Contents:

Minotaur (after Jorge Luis Borges]

Samples:

Pania Press

Available:

Pania Press
2/ 5 Hastings Rd
Mairangi Bay
North Shore City 0630
Auckland

RRP: $NZ75 (postage included within NZ)

•

Book design: Bronwyn Lloyd

(November 6) Minotaur: A Translation of "Laberinto," by Jorge Luis Borges. Auckland: Pania Press, 2008. 4 pp. [gift edition]

Contents:

Minotaur

•

Poetry NZ 38 (2009)

2009-02-08T15:22:00.015+13:00

Cover design: Bill Wieben / Cover photgraphy: Nic Brown

Poetry New Zealand 38 (March 2009). ISSN 0114-5770. 111 pp.

Contents:

Jack Ross / Editorial / 9

FEATURE

Jen Crawford / background / 10

– / from Pop Riveter / 11-26

POEMS

Johanna Aitchison / We Have Come to Collect Our Lives / 27

– / Sibling Rivalry / 28

Raewyn Alexander / ‘Men a mystery to me’ / 29

– / Beautiful liars and their gloss / 30

Rosetta Allan / Uncle / 31

Ruth Arnison / The bare facts / 32

Serie Barford / The Takata Effect / 33

Guy R. Beining / A knight without armorment / 34

Robert James Berry / Rasputin / 35

Iain Britton / Pania / 36

Tony Chad / Signature Brand / 37

Janet Charman / Wahine / 38

Jennifer Compton / – I Like That Clown / 39

– / The Pines / 40

Craig Cotter / rice balls for son / 41

Brett Cross / Prophet / 42

Shirley Deuchrass / Aestralata lessoni / 43

Grant Duncan / Conductress / 44

– / Crepusculum / 45

J. J. Fagan / Kumara Diggers / 46

Derek Fenton / A Tale of Two Heroes / 47

Sue Fitchett / Sweet & sour notes / 48

Janis Freegard / Magpie / 49

Michael Hall / Small town takeaway / 50

Alice Hooton / Café Black Cat / 51

– / Mrs Casy / 52

David Howard / On Bertolt Brecht’s Birthday / 53

– / You should have seen them go / 53

– / Come down / 54-55

Linda Hunter / Moon Creek / 56

Hayden Hyams / Rattle / 57

– / Waitakere / 58

Helen Jacobs / The White of Winter / 59

Sophia Johnson / These hills / 60

Mahdy Khaiyat / Nice / 61

Leonard Lambert / Curtain-call / 62

Noel Monahan / The Calf-Bearer / 63

Tim Nees / Buying Power / 64

Jenny O’Brien / Night / 65

John O’Connor / Five Haiku / 66

– / River Talk / 67

Jacqueline C. Ottaway / Tales out of School / 68

– / André Went to Christchurch / 69

Mark Pirie / The Park / 70-71

Kerry Popplewell / Konini School, 1910 / 72

– / Summer 1943 / 73

Lee Posna / An Address / 74

– / A degree in November Spring / 75

– / Blood in the mountain / 76

Richard Reeve / Inquisition / 77

– / Elegy / 78

– / Dawn / 79

Nicholas Reid / Homage to Diogenes / 80-81

Michael Sharkey / Young Woman with a Tea-Towel / 82

Michael Steven / On Francis Street / 83

– / Seventeen Seconds: Mahurangi Ridge / 84

– / The eel (after Montale) / 85-86

Ann Walker / Notes on a Day / 87

– / The day Lauris Edmond died / 88

Saint James Harris Wood / Cash Crow, Cash Crow / 89

– / Tumbleweed / 90-92

COMMENT

Lee Posna / Contemporary American Poetry / 93-100

REVIEWS

Richard Reeve/ Jack Ross & Jan Kemp, ed. NZ Poets in Performance, 3 vols (Auckland: AUP, 2006-8) / 101-6

Jack Ross / Books & Magazines in brief / 107-8:
Coral Atkinson & David Gregory, ed. Land very Fertile: Banks Peninsula in Poetry & Prose (Christchurch: CUP, 2008)
Stu Bagby, ed. Just Another Fantastic Anthology: Auckland in Poetry (Auckland: Antediluvian Press, 2008)
Helen Bascand, into the vanishing point (Wellington: Steele Roberts, 2007)
Michael Harlow, The Tram Conductor’s Blue Cap (Auckland: AUP, 2009)
John O’Connor, Parts of the Moon: Selected Haiku & Senryu, 1988-2007 (Teneriffe, Queensland: Post Pressed, 2007)
Takahe 64 (Winter 2008)

CONTRIBUTOR NOTES / 109-11

Samples:

Poetry New Zealand

Reviews & Comments:

New NZ Poets in Performance (2008)

2008-03-10T14:47:00.030+13:00

Cover image: Sara Hughes / Cover design: Christine Hansen /
Text design: Katrina Duncan

New New Zealand Poets in Performance. Edited by Jack Ross. Poems selected by Jack Ross and Jan Kemp. ISBN 978 1 86940 4093. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2008. xiv + 146 pp.

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgements

Anne Kennedy (b. 1959)
I was a feminist in the eighties
Cat Tales
Whenua (2)
Biography / Selected Bibliography

David Howard (b. 1959)
Talking Sideways
Social Studies
On the Eighth Day
Biography / Selected Bibliography

John Newton (b. 1959)
Lunch
Ferret trap
Inland
Opening the Book
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Serie (Cherie) Barford (b. 1960)
Plea to the Spanish Lady
God is near the Equator
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Jenny Bornholdt (b. 1960)
Rodnie and her bicycles
Bus stop
Weather
Then Murray came
Please, pay attention
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Jenny Powell-Chalmers (b. 1960)
Carnival of Chocolate
Linda
Lunch Box
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Gregory O’Brien (b. 1961)
Epithalamium, Wellington
It will be better then
Solomon singing
from Great Lake
There is only one
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Chris Price (b. 1962)
Ghastlily
The Origins of Science
Keeping ravens
Biography / Selected Bibliography

John Pule (b. 1962)
from Restless People
Ka hola
He
Liogi
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Jack Ross (b. 1962)
Except Once
A Woman Named Intrepid
Idyll
Disorder and Early Sorrow
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Andrew Johnston (b. 1963)
How to Talk
How to Walk
Les Baillessats
The Present
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Glenn Colquhoun (b. 1964)
from Whakapapa
She asked me if she took one pill for her heart …
Lost property
On the death of my grandmother
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Lynda Chanwai-Earle (b. 1965)
Details from a personal journal
Gasp
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Sonja Yelich (b. 1965)
narrow neck from the boat ramp
1YA
writing desk
whangaparaoa – on the sundeck
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Tusiata Avia (b. 1966)
My Dog
My First Time in Samoa
Wild Dogs Under My Skirt
Biography / Selected Bibliography

James Brown (b. 1966)
Loneliness
Soup From a Stone
The Crewe Cres Kids
The Day I Stopped Writing Poetry
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Anna Jackson (b. 1967)
The hen of tiredness
Takahe
On the road with Rose
In a minute
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Sarah Quigley (b. 1967)
New York Four
Restless
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Robert Sullivan (b. 1967)
Waka 46
V Honda Waka
Waka 70 i Matakitaki
Waka 62 A narrator’s note
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Emma Neale (b. 1969)
Spoken For
Jane Coleridge
You’re Telling Me
Confessional Poem
Caroline Helstone
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Kate Camp (b. 1972)
Postcard
Documentaries
Backroads
Water of the Sweet Life
Guests
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Tracey Slaughter (b. 1972)
anatomy of dancing with your future wife
biography day
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Nick Ascroft (b. 1973)
The Badder & the Better
All of the Other Ascrofts Are Dead
Cheap Present
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Kapka Kassabova (b. 1973)
Preparation for the big emptiness
One morning like a sleeper
My life in two parts
A city of pierced amphorae
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Thérèse Lloyd (b. 1974)
Forecast
One Hundred Hours
Scorpion Daughter
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Mark Pirie (b. 1974)
Good Looks
Making a Point
Progress
The Third Form
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Olivia Macassey (b. 1975)
Outhwaite Park
Outer Suburb
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Richard Reeve (b. 1976)
Dark Unloading: A Villanelle
Ranfurly
Victory Beach
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Track List

Variant Readings

Bibliography

Samples:

Aotearoa NZ Poetry Sound Archive

The Imaginary Museum

Available:

Auckland University Press
The University Of Auckland
1-11 Short St.
Private Bag 92019
Auckland
New Zealand
aup@auckland.ac.nz
http://www.auckland.ac.nz/aup/

RRP: $NZ 45.00

Reviews & Comments:

AUP, "New New Zealand Poets in Performance." forthcoming (24/6/08):

The third in the Poets in Performance series, this book collects the work of a new generation of poets - from Anne Kennedy to Glenn Colquhoun, Jenny Bornholdt to Robert Sullivan - who came to prominence in the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s. These poets are notable for their variety, their distinctive voices and their fresh approaches to poetic form and subject. As in Classic and Contemporary New Zealand Poets in Performance, Ross and Kemp have selected and presented on two CDs material from the Aotearoa New Zealand Poetry Sound Archive, completed in 2004. There are more than two hours of poets reading their own work and the accompanying book prints the texts of the poems as they have been read. Selected bibliographies and short biographies for each poet and an appendix of variant readings are also included.

Jessica Le Bas, "The joy of rhythm and rhyme." Nelson Mail (16/7/08):

Jack Ross and Jan Kemp have edited a series, New Zealand Poets in Performance, each year now since 2006 - first classic poets, then contemporary poets. This month sees the launch of another, New New Zealand Poets in Performance (Auckland University Press, $44.99), heralding new voices in the poetry scene.

What makes this series attractive is that each book comes with two CDs of the poets reading a selection of their work. Now you can stay home, with your cognac and your fire roaring (heat pump doesn't seem to have the same poetic cadence, does it?), and listen to Allen Curnow reading The Skeleton of the Great Moa, or Denis Glover reading his quintessential Magpies.

There's Baxter and Hunt in this series, C K Stead and O'Sullivan, to name a few good poets. In this latest collection, you can hear Glenn Colquhoun and Jenny Bornholdt. What better place to start sampling New Zealand Poetry?

Jennifer Little, "Poetry CDs an alternative to Talkback Radio." Massey News (16/7/08):

Compact disc recordings in a new anthology of New Zealand's hottest new poets promise to engage a wide audience, including those who are not “poetry fiends”, says one of its co-editors Massey English lecturer Dr Jack Ross ...

“A lot of people might want to try listening to the poems while they're in the car driving to work," Dr Ross says. "Instead of talkback radio, why not open up to some new ideas with a poem?”

The book follows Classic New Zealand Poets in Performance and Contemporary New Zealand Poets in Performance and brings together 28 young to mid-career poets, including Anne Kennedy, Jenny Bornholdt, Glenn Colquhoun and Andrew Johnston, to celebrate “the rich jangle of clashing ideas, voices, genders that combine to make a living culture”, Dr Ross says in his introduction.

Peter Dornauf, "Tuning into Mid-career Poets." Waikato Times (2/8/08):

This volume and CDs, along with the other two companions, will make a very useful, worthwhile addition to secondary and tertiary libraries as well as to the libraries of individual dedicated followers of lyrical fashion.

"New New Zealand Poets in Performance." Unity Books Spring Newsletter (20/8/08):

A companion to classy, bestselling anthologies Classic New Zealand Poets in Performance and Contemporary New Zealand Poets in Performance, this new collection features 28 young and mid-career poets notable for variety, freshness, IQ and distinctiveness and presents material from the Aotearoa New Zealand Poetry Sound Archive (includes 2 CDs).

Pat White, "A Delight for Poetry Lovers." Wairarapa Times (20/8/08):

This volume brings to a close the most thorough survey of New Zealand poetry ever undertaken. Three volumes have been published with material gleaned from a comprehensive ctalogue of poets reading their work which has been stored as the Aotearoa New Zealand Poetry Sound Archive ...

The volume is attractively printed, with an easily used layout, all work is referenced and accompanied by biographical notes. Any reader of poetry will find this sequence of publications an essential reference, quite apart form a very satisfying access point to much that is best in New Zealand poets writing at their best.

Without a doubt the monumental task Kemp and Ross set themselves must have grown to something more than they imagined possible. Now however, the results speak for themselves. We have a very valuable progress report on the state of poetry, for the delight of this country's poetry lovers, and the use of its students. as editors Kemp and Ross deserve the nation's thanks for a task completed well.

Margaret Christensen, "New New Zealand Poets in Performance." Wairarapa Times-Age (23/8/08):

Editors Ross and Kemp here continue the excellent selections they have made, along with archival CDs, in the past few years. ... All together the collections mine work which gives an overview in both sight and
sound of the topography of poetry in this country.
...
All of the poets included have quite impressive track records of publication in this country and overseas. They have won many awards, which are handily documented at the end of each poet's selection - which is very useful for students of our literature, both now and later.
...
Crises have obviously occurred in these lives but the reader can only guess at the triggering circumstances. That does not necessarily mean that the reader is left bewildered, just aware.

"New New Zealand Poets in Performance." Art News reviews (Spring 08) (27/8/08):

There's no doubt that hearing poetry read aloud is a much more physical, dynamic and dramatic experience that brings the rhythm, tone and rhyme of the medium to the fore. In this multi-media publication, which includes two CDs of poets in performance mostly taken from the Aotearoa New Zealand Poetry Sound Archive, established in 2004 by poet Jan Kemp, the reader has the best of both worlds. the third in a series of 'New Zealand Poets in performance', this features the voices of 28 of New Zealand's young to mid-career poets, including Kate Camp, Anne Kennedy, Gregory O'Brien and James Brown, whose quirky, irreverent poem about seeing Elvis "just walking across the quad in no particular hurry" is a gem. Two hours of poets reading their work, accompanied by the text of each poem, makes this a treat for poetry lovers.

Trevor Reeves, "New New Zealand Poets in Performance." Southern Ocean Review (2008):

164 pages of anthology again (third time) of the poets in performance, with two nice cd's to play with the actual poets reading their work. This time there are some South Island poets in there, including Richard Reeve who is making a big name for himself as an establishment poet. Also Jenny Powell-Chalmers writing about Dunedin (good on her) with 'Carnival of Chocolate'. Ideal for reading aloud, and she does read well. Even trivia like “Lunch Box' sounds good read. Nick Ascroft is in there too. New Zealand is bountifully supplied with bright new poets making their mark now. When you have nothing much to write about, you can make even the most mundane sound brilliantly exciting, as in 'The Badder & the Better'. I liked Anne Kennedy's poem: 'I was a feminist in the eighties', ending: “Then a lion came prowling out of the jungle / and ate the feminist all up”. David Howard writes competently and his work sounds good read out, quite entertaining in fact. James Brown is good…. entertaining stuff, especially 'Loneliness', about Elvis Presley. Unpretentious, funny, great. A full book of very competent practitioners of the poetic arts, and nice to listen to, too.

Sam Finnemore, "Books: New New Zealand Poets in Performance." Craccum 16 (2008):

As with the last two instalments, Jack Ross and Jan Kemp have chosen smartly from the 2004 Aotearoa New Zealand Poetry Archive, and there's so much to enjoy here: highlights include Robert Sullivan's remarkable 'Star Waka' poems; Anna Jackson's breathy delivery of razor sharp verse; John Pule, Tusiata Avia and James Brown. It's a useful chance to reassess certain poets too; Glenn Colquhoun, who I'd never particularly rated on the page since Playing God, comes across notably well both in the book and on CD.

Both the book and the recordings come across as distinctly fresh and modern, and the editors have clearly achieved their goal; of creating a clear identity for each volume of the Poets in Performance trilogy. The combination of book and CD is effective as ever; iPod users can sift the audio around usefully while keeping the original discs safely nested inside the book itself, for this is going to be a book worth taking care of. New New Zealand Poets in Performance makes a solid end to Ross and Kemp's series, a smart package well-chosen from a huge range of material and likely to have enduring value as a poetic snapshot of the now. Highly recommended.

Richard Reeve, "Review of Jack Ross and Jan Kemp (eds), Classic, Contemporary and New New Zealand Poets in Performance (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2006-8)." Poetry NZ 38 (2009): 101-6.

Ross and Kemp’s editorial selection is eclectic, pragmatic and personal, with gems in all three books. ...

As a unit, New Zealand Poets in Peformance does give a sense of the voice enshrined of different epochs and cultures and, importantly, the volumes illustrate continuity (as distinct from ‘progress’, which in poetry is no longer a permissible concept) in the passage from Brasch and Curnow to Olivia Macassey and Mark Pirie, with the artform surviving all critical prescriptions from all times, cheating attempts to pin it down. Hearing poets reading their work often changes one’s impression of the text. In several cases, what at first glance seem to be bad poems on the page are transformed by a poet’s voice into powerful, acutely realised poetic moments, while other poems that impress at first reading come across as flat and uninspired when delivered by the author. This exemplifies the enigma of what constitutes ‘voice’ in poetry: some well-loved, celebrated poets are dry performers of their work, yet few would say they don’t have a voice. To the editors’ lasting credit, their compilation presents many such faces of poetry, with surprises that warrant returning to again and again to savour. That, in the end, is the most anyone can ask for.

Helen Dennis, "Review of Chris Orsman, The Lakes of Mars (AUP, 2008); Sam Sampson, everything talks (AUP, 2008); Bob Orr, Calypso (AUP, 2008); Sonja Yelich Get Some (AUP, 2008); New New Zealand Poets in Performance, ed. Jack Ross & Jan Kemp (AUP, 2008); Richard Reeve, In Continents (AUP, 2008); Leonard Lambert, Skywire (Steele Roberts, 2008)." The Warwick Review (March 2009): 61-72 [66-67]:

[Jack Ross & Jan Kemp (eds), New New Zealand Poets in Performance (Auckland University Press, 2008), ISBN 978-1-86940-409-3, 146 pp, NZ$44.95 (pb)]

... Both [Sonja] Yelich and Richard Reeve are featured in the compendious collection of New New Zealand Poets in Performance. The debate continues in poetry circles as to the necessity and point of poets performing their own work, with some declaring that if the poem works properly on the page, i.e. if the poet's craft is up to the job, then performance is totally unnecessary. On the other hand, others believe that the poetic text is somewhat like a musical score waiting to be interpreted and performed by the poet, who is thus both "composer" and "instrumentalist". I tend towards the latter view, depending on the type of poetry. Certainly New New Zealand Poets in Performance is a delightful introduction to a wide diversity of new New Zealand poetic voices, and given the differences between received English pronunciation in the UK and kiwi English, it is extremely useful to have the poets' own voices interpreting their works on two CDs here. Twenty-eight young and mid-career poets are represented, so it is impossible to give many name checks; but listen to the cumulative humour of the first poem, "I was a Feminist in the eighties" by Anne Kennedy, and I swear you'll be hooked!

Allan Phillipson, "Review of Jack Ross and Jan Kemp (eds), New New Zealand Poets in Performance, (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2008), pp. 162 (plus two CDs), ISBN-13: 978-1-86940-409-3.” CNZS Bulletin of New Zealand Studies 2 (2009):

I can remember seeing John Newton’s “Ferret Trap” (p. 13) for the first time in 1988, in Mark Williams’ Caxton Press Anthology: New Zealand Poetry 1972-1986. The poem gave me a sense of recognition and unease, the rural environment captured (“the chooks in the macrocarpas”) and twisted (“sheep’s heart jammed on a nail”). Twenty years later, hearing Newton’s South Island Gothic as I drive through the Devon countryside, I almost missed my turnoff as the sound took me back to my grandfather’s woolshed: the rusty rabbit traps, the nooses of bailing twine, the greasy creak of the gates. In his preface, Ross advises us to take these poems and “listen to them in the car” (p. xii), but I say no – the process is too distracting, too dangerous.

This series has done an immense amount of good in preserving and disseminating the voices of our writers. The value of hearing poets read cannot be underestimated. From the clipped, almost British tones of Allen Curnow in volume one, to the ‘Mad Kiwi Ranter’ persona of David Eggleton in volume two, each of the recordings reflect and illuminate an aspect of our history. Ross stated that poets to come would have their own “virtual reality webcasts” (p. ix), and implied that this series would come to an end with volume three. I fervently hope that this is not the case, and that both the Poetry Sound Archive and its publications will continue.

Green, Paula, & Harry Ricketts. 99 Ways into NZ Poetry. A Vintage Book (Auckland: Random House New Zealand, 2010):

As a follow-up to the impressive efforts of Jan Kemp, Jonathan Lamb and Alan Smythe to record as many major New Zealand poets as possible (1974), Kemp and Smythe decided to establish a more expansive archive of spoken poetry (2002). The final result, the Aotearoa New Zealand Poetry Sound Archive, is in the Special Collections at the University of Auckland and includes 171 poets. This comprehensive project allowed poets twenty minutes each and CD space for complementary material such as bibliographies and images. With a copy of the archive now deposited at the Alexander Turnbull Library, the significance of listening to poetry is made more tangible with access to the reading or performance of a considerable number of New Zealand poets now available. One offshoot of the archival project is a series of anthologies published by Auckland University Press that allow a poetry audience to both read and hear poems by key New Zealand poets. Edited by Kemp and Jack Ross, the anthologies are grouped in chronological clusters: Classic New Zealand Poets in Performance, Contemporary New Zealand Poets in Performance and New New Zealand Poets in Performance. One can hear the shift in the reading styles over generations, from the earlier tones of poets such as A R D Fairburn, R A K Mason, Charles Brasch and Allen Curnow (lofty, polite and rhapsodic) to the more conversational qualities (mellifluous, lyrical or downbeat) of contemporary poets as diverse as David Howard, Andrew Johnston, Mark Pirie, Sonja Yelich and Kate Camp. [Paula Green, 'Performing the Poem', pp.267-68].

•

EMO (2008)

2008-03-10T14:44:00.038+13:00

Cover image: Emma Smith, "have I been pardoned yet?" (detail)

The R.E.M. [Random Excess Memory] Trilogy, 3:

EMO. A Novel by Jack Ross. ISBN 978-1-877441-07-3. Auckland: Titus Books, 2008. [vi] + 258 pp.

Contents:

EVA AVE

1. Eva Android
2. Dear E.
3. Family Album
4. February 6, 1935
5. The Cat
6. February 11, 1935
7. Strange Meeting
8. The Contract
9. February 15, 1935
10. First Night
11. Arrival
12. February 18, 1935
13. Searching
14. Work
15. March 11, 1935
16. The Vivisectionist
17. 1001 Nights
18. March 16, 1935
19. Beauty and the Beast
20. Dogs
21. Night Visit
22. April 1, 1935
23. Together Forever
24. The Excursion
25. April 29, 1935
26. Madness
27. The Hotel
28. May 10, 1935
29. Murder
30. But his hands were around my throat
31. Ten Days that Shook the World
32. The Trial
33. May 28, 1935
34. Last Day of a Condemned Man

MOONS OF MARS

1. Marlow
2. Welcome to my World
3. The Invitation
4. Welcome to my World (2)
5. Hysterical Blindness
6. Welcome to my World (3)
7. Luce
8. Dinner
9. Burmese Days
10. The Bargain
11. Backstory
12. Somnambulism
13. Chantage
14. The Investigation
15. Trois filles de leur mère
16. Club D
17. Glam Metal Detectives
18. Night Journey
19. Outside
20. Trilogies
21. Rumble Edge Line
22. Trilogies (2)
23. Life on Mars
24. Trilogies (3)
25. Hydrogen
26. King Candaules
27. Free Love
28. Helium
29. Confessions
30. Marriage
31. High
32. Terminus
33. The Great Stone Face
34. Doubts
35. Iris
36. Iris Recognition
37. Iris Out

OVID IN OTHERWORLD

1. Ovidius Naso
2. Tristia 3.2
3. Video-consult
4. The Undead
5. Tristia 3.3
6. Blood-drive
7. Exul Ludens
8. Tristia 3.8
9. Drip-feed
10. Blinding
11. Tristia 3.10
12. Truth-telling
13. ovid v. divo
14. Tristia 3.12
15. Witch-finding
16. roma amor
17. Tristia 3.13
18. Hypno-slave
19. Ovids 3
20. Tristia 5.7
21. Fever-dreams
22. Ovid in the Third Reich
23. Tristia 5.10
24. Head-hunter
25. Six Memos for the Next Millennium
26. Tristia 5.12
27. Title-story
28. Lost Books of the Fasti
29. Epistulae 1.2
30. Poetry-reading
31. Sleep Threshold – Hypnagogia
32. Epistulae 4.7
33. Face-saving
34. Ovid Misunderstood
35. Epistulae 4.10
36. Scene-stealing
37. Suetonius: “Divus Augustus”
38. Epistulae 4.14
39. Fasti V: 421-44
40. Dream-catcher

Cover design: Brett Cross

Palimpsest Texts:

SCHEHERAZADE'S WEB:
The 1001 Nights and Comparative Literature

Preface
Introduction
Chapter 1 - Malory and Scheherazade: A Study in Narrative Method
Chapter 2 - Europe, Christianity and the Crusades in the 1001 Nights
Chapter 3 - Voyage en Orient: The Victorian Traveller and the Arabian Nights
Chapter 4 - Parodies of the Nights in Nineteenth-century Literature
Chapter 5 - The Poetics of Stasis: Twentieth-century Readings of the Nights
Works Cited
Bibliography
Chronology
Concordance

JACK'S METAMORPHOSES:
Collage-Poems & Sequences (1997-2007)

Metamorphoses I: Chaos
Jack’s Metamorphoses
Metamorphoses II: The Crow
Evenings in the Blackout
Metamorphoses III: Semele
Dieting. I’m Hungry too
Metamorphoses IV: Daughters of Minyas
In the Cave of Henry James
Metamorphoses V: Arethusa
The Britney Suite
Metamorphoses VI: Marsyas
Ancestral Voices
Metamorphoses VII: Theseus
Anamorphoses
Metamorphoses VIII: Icarus
Love in Wartime
Metamorphoses IX: Iolaus
Postcards
Metamorphoses X: Pygmalion
Servants of the Wankh
Metamorphoses XI: Midas
Suburban Apocalypse
Metamorphoses XII: Rumour
Days Under Water
Metamorphoses XIII: Glaucus
Citizens of the People’s Republic of Freaktown
Metamorphoses XIV: Pomona
Muses
Metamorphoses XV: Hippolytus
Papyri
Notes on Sources

Publius Ovidius Naso:
TRISTIA, EPISTULAE EX PONTO & IBIS

Tristia
Book I
Book II
Book III
Book IV
Book V

Epistulae ex Ponto
Book I
Book II
Book III
Book IV

Ibis

Blurb:

In the third volume of his REM trilogy, after the urban inferno of Nights with Giordano Bruno (2000) and the purgatorial stasis of The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis (2006), Jack Ross explores the closest thing to a paradise his cast of crazies can conceive of – let alone aspire to.

E M O

RANDOM EXCESS MEMORY

“ … I had a companion when I first came here, all those years ago. But we spent too long exploring our new world. When he tried to leave he shrivelled into dust. I found his body and buried him. Flint, he was called.”
“But ... why didn’t you shrivel into dust. If you followed him out.”
“He never drank the water or ate the weeds.”
“But ...”
Suddenly something clicked into place. She saw the milky mildness of his deep-set eyes as they actually were: a mask for thick, impenetrable cataracts of scar-tissue.
“Yes, I fed you on them. I’m sorry. I want you to stay with me and be my wife.”

EARTH
MARS
OTHERWORLD

... the book itself exists like a music of the spheres that runs along the tops of the pages, available only to a concentrated sense of hearing, but as real as fuck.
- Will Christie

Abstract:

"There’s an obsession with blindness, certainly – with ageing dictators and visionaries: Hitler, Ovid, Shahryar. What else can we say about the narrator of this book? He (or she) takes refuge in flights of fancy, posting pseudonymous entries on the web.

Later they’re printed out on the backs of any pages, used or scribbled on, that come to hand.

Each of the three stories explores a set of flawed relationship: Hitler and Eva, Marlow and Phil, Ovid and the wise-woman. …

Is it all an attempt to find the perfect partner, whether she be android clone, registered nurse, or girl-next-door? ..."

This book consists of a set of three online narratives: one devoted to Earth (EVA AVE), a futuristic story about a girl convinced that she’s the clone of Hitler’s mistress Eva Braun; one to Mars (Moons of Mars), the story of a violent sex-ring based under the pyramids of Mars; and one set in the Otherworld of a patient under psychoanalysis (Ovid in Otherworld), who believes that he’s the poet Ovid, in exile on the Black Sea. The titles of the stories make an anagram of the word EMO: a neo-gothic youth style, derived (allegedly) from the words “Excessively Emotional”. Before publication, I copied each story onto pages already “contaminated” by other texts: a critical book about the 1001 Nights, a set of poetry pageworks grouped around Ovid’s Metamorphoses, as well as the Latin text of Ovid’s exile letters. These can be seen (but not clearly read) through the print of the “over-story”.

Online Texts:

EVA AVE

Moons of Mars

Ovid in Otherworld

Scheherazade's Web

Tristia, Epistulae & Ibis

Samples:

Jack's Metamorphoses

Papyri

The Britney Suite

The Cat

Available:

Titus Books
PO Box 102
Waimauku
West Auckland
New Zealand
titus@snap.net.nz
http:/titus.books.online.fr/

RRP: $NZ 44.95 (+ $2 postage & packing)

[Titus Book launch (l9/6/08)]

Reviews & Comments:

Jen Crawford, "Jack Ross's EMO: Launch speech at Alleluya cafe, Thursday 19th June." blue acres (24/6/08):

... this is a book which isn’t satisfied with being self-contained. It reaches beyond its own covers, beyond its author, inviting you into one of the great endangered pleasures of literature – which is the sense of its endlessness, the way one book can open another book for you, like a friend giving you a private gift; perhaps the key to a room you can now share – a room, of course, which would have many other doors.

Scott Hamilton, "Independent's Night." Scoop Review of Books (24/6/08):

Like its predecessors, Nights with Giordano Bruno and The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis, Ross’ EMO is a sprawling, delightfully bewildering work. Ross sets several stories in motion, as he moves between Mars, Nazi Germany, and the dream-like version of Auckland’s North Shore that recurs almost obsessively in his writing. At the heart of EMO is the tale of a recently blinded writer and his servant, a very human android named Eva. The embittered writer tries to impose his will upon Eva, but she subtly resists his whims. The story of Eva and her faltering master has the simple power of a fable, and Ross finds parallels for it in the Arabian Nights, as well as in the relationship between Hitler and his secretary-cum-wife, Eva Braun ...

Ross is a lapidarian scholar, fluent in half a dozen languages, but he is also a passionate fan of America’s Next Top Model, and his writing has always refused to distinguish between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture. The very look of EMO mocks the conventions of both literature and academic scholarship - texts are artfully layered on its outsize pages, alongside photographs, cartoons, and cryptic diagrams. Ross’ prose is full of dirty jokes, as well as learned asides and sad observations. EMO could keep you busy for years on a desert island, but it can also entertain you during that hour between the end of Shortland St and the beginning of Desperate Housewives.

Bill Direen, "Review of EMO." Percutio 3 (2009): 82.

My review copy measured in at 17.4 x 24.7 x 2.1 cm which, knowing Jack a little, might represent some mystical dimension of an alchemical age. The first impression is dramatic. Here we have a book uncharacteristically (for both the author and for Titus Books) large and boldly striking (with its blood-red sketch of a weary child's face); it also invites a biplanar approach. It is at once strident and muted. ... The impression is of a private studio, reflection of the writer's mind, scattered with his influences and cuttings which have appealed to him over the years, which have formed him.

Richard Taylor, "Review of EMO." brief 39 (2010): 116-21.

In terms of pure formal complexity, “visual beauty”, originality of form and intellection connected to a strong underlying ethic, EMO is a unique masterpiece of an innovative and original kind, rarely seen in NZ literature. Jack Ross has long had a very real and intense fascination with stories and tales: in particular science fiction, horror, fantasy, stories of Borges and others, along with other literature; and most prominently in EMO, the stories from 1001 Nights, and those of Ovid’s Metamophoses. Despite an extensive and sometimes disturbing use of sex, violence, Fantasy, Gothic, and of irony, it is an ultimately engrossing and enchanting tale, or a tale about writing or of writing magical tales. And whatever else it is, EMO is homage to Story, and the pure magic of The Tale.
...
Are we then in some monstrous intellectual monument with no end – can this book not be read and enjoyed? Do we all have to read all works of literature and so on and read modern philosophy to enjoy or deal with this book? Do we have to wade through all these codes and complexities and cryptics? I must confess that this was my own doubt. But the main text’s story, or stories, makes up what is in itself a narrative of extraordinary adventures, and indeed the central section is set on Mars, involves intrigue, seduction, sado-masochism, drugs, murder, as well as codes. We are in a labyrinth, but it is compensated for by the very enchanting language that Ross uses, and the intensity of the many episodes in the book.

Brett Cross, "Power Relations and Sexual Manipulation: Review of EMO, by Jack Ross (Titus Books, 2008) $44.95." Landfall 219 - On Music (2010): 189-91.

The poetry is one of the highlights of the book, simple and moving, contemporary yet mythical: here is Ross writing at his best. Ovid, too, is the other genuinely sympathetic character in EMO, 'bookending' nicely with Eva in the opening section.

When an author tries to do so much in a book, experimenting radically with layout, story structure, plot, character and setting, there are bound to be certain things that excite and exasperate different readers. Most, though, should be won over by both the cryptic and engaging design, and by the unremitting atmosphere of gothic mystery.

Scott Hamilton, "Against all 'decent restraint': Jack Ross talks about EMO." Reading the Maps (5/2/11):

I'm certainly pleased to be able to publish an interview with the venerable Jack Ross which has apparently proved too long for any of our local offline literary journals to host. The interview was conducted by Richard Taylor, a man with a longstanding and well-deserved reputation for digression, and moves through subjects as different and differently interesting as life on Mars, the future of the book, the last days of the Roman poet Ovid, the 'socio-sexual extremism' of Kathy Acker, Auckland's 1998 power blackout, and the political consequences of the suppression of emotion.

As they chat, Jack and Richard return again and again to EMO, the large and strange novel Jack published in September 2008. Jack has a vast private library, which he has catalogued in disconcerting detail on a website named A Gentle Madness, and EMO, with its multiple layers of text, multiple plots, and slips between distant times and places, often seems like an attempt to fit a whole library between the covers of one volume. Precisely because of its improvisational, wide-ranging nature, Richard's chat with Jack makes a good introduction to the book. ...

Interview (abridged)
[edited by Bill Direen]:

EMO: A DIALOGUE
between Richard Taylor & Jack Ross

Richard: EMO – what does it mean and why is it the title?

Jack: Well, it’s a musical style – and a kind of lifestyle choice. “Emo” stands for “extremely emotional” (or so I’m told). It’s rather like the Goth style, only Goths tend to see Emos as very suburban and spurious. When I heard about it a few years ago, I thought it perfectly summed up what I was trying to do in this book – both the excessive emotionalism and the faint air of the spurious. After that, though, I started making up a whole series of puns as retrospective justifications: E/ Earth – M/ Mars – O / Otherworld; and E/ Eva – M/ Marlow – O/Ovid. That gave me my core cast. The mood preceded the material in this case.

Richard: Am I right in saying that EMO is quite different from the work of other writers today because you are yourself quite vigorously using the Internet and Blogs to allow the reader to follow the various "strands" of EMO?

Jack: The internet and the idea of hypertext and shifting plains of reference is certainly a gift to the aspiring labyrinth-builder. Joyce and Escher seem to have got along okay without it, but I guess for me the world-wide-web is a kind of democratisation of the impulse: everyone their own Borges, with a tithe of the effort.

As far as the death of the author goes, well, there is another Jack Ross – a hard-bitten desert-loving Reno detective in the works of a guy named Bernard Schopen (and actually, since EMO was published, yet another Jack Ross has surfaced: a Scottish crime-writer who wrote a book called Requiem) – so maybe I am dead after all, and just don’t know it … I deliberately fail to name the protagonist in all three books of the trilogy. Which makes sense to me because they’re all focussed on a central male figure undergoing some kind of extreme turmoil (they might all be versions of the same person, in fact). But actually all three books are by me, and I’m a male, resident in Auckland (where all three books are set), sharing many experiences with these central figures, etc. So of course they are all me. But then they’re not, either, because they’re fictionally-projected personages in mysterious mirror-worlds. These seem to me unavoidable accompaniments to the whole business of writing fiction. You could say that I was deconstructing fiction by undermining certain aspects of the projection – pointing out the paradox of pretending to be someone else when everyone knows it’s just you in a funny wig. But then Cervantes did all that in Don Quixote and it didn’t stop his characters seeming real – or believable, which isn’t quite the same thing.

I guess EMO takes this lack of verisimilitude pretty far. It’s hard for me to believe that many readers will be comfortable with such naked and perfunctory scaffolding I provide in various parts of the story. But then I’m not particularly interested in making people feel comfortable. You’ve got to go pretty far nowadays to wake them up at all – to break up the frozen sea within them, as Kafka said.

Richard: Do you think that there are too many “strands” or “themes” in EMO?

Jack: Well, there’s a lot of stuff in there, certainly. I make no apology about that. Too much is a value judgement every reader will have to make for themselves. I’d say there were too many plots and stories in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, myself – it’s not a particularly unified work. “Is EMO so overpacked as to be incoherent?” I guess you’re asking. I’m sure some readers will think so. But I suppose the readers I want are the ones who like to read into things – who don’t expect everything to present itself elegantly on the surface so they can move on to the next thing as rapidly as possible. Nobody’s obligated to dive into EMO. I hope, in fact, that only the people who get a kick out of that kind of thing do. It’s hard to see it seriously comparing with the Cantos or Finnegans Wake or Maximus or those other twentieth-century whales when it comes to being packed with material, though. Even Moby Dick or Tristram Shandy, for that matter.

Richard: [comment question] I don't see EMO as only a novel. In fact I don't see it fitting into any particular genre. I would say that EMO is multi-textual and involves (like Nights and The Imaginary Museum) many visual elements. It also connects to popular and high culture and so on.

Jack: I’d certainly concur with that. And again, I don’t claim any great originality there. It’s got a lot of competing generic elements (as do Kathy Acker’s “novels”). I chose the designation “novel” for it for various reasons, I guess:
because it sounds more approachable (and therefore salable) than calling it an “experimental text” or something like that.
because I’m in love with the idea of the novel form: a genre so debatable, so potentially all-inclusive that it can straddle bourgeois fiction, magic realism, Apuleius, traditional Chinese & Japanese forms, and virtually anything else you can throw at it. Where are its limits, in fact? We haven’t reached them yet.

Richard: Did you deliberately place the text that is “horizontal”, which I call the “subtext”, and which contains all the stories and other texts on your other Blogs etc, in such a way that it obscures the “main text”? This “slowing the reader” down, making the reader pay attention to the process of your writing?

Jack: Yes, that was one reason. A literal metaphor for the contextualising we all do when we try to make sense of one text in terms of another. Really, though, it was because I saw some letters written in the early nineteenth-century, around the Jane Austen era, where the writer had crossed the text – written first horizontally, then vertically, on the same piece of paper – with every confidence that their correspondent would make sense of it. That was done purely to conserve paper, of course (at a premium during the Napoleonic wars, I understand). But it just looked so fantastic – so impenetrable and mysterious. I immediately started to wonder how one could reproduce that effect in a printed book.

Why should one bother is I guess one valid question, but the answer must be because it enables you to literally incorporate many texts in one. There are, then, three books contained within the one book of EMO. There’s the principal text on top, the three novellas, but underneath that there’s a complete book of critical essays on the Thousand and One Nights (written by me, of course, but attributed in context to the main male character in the Eva Ave story – insofar as that isn’t me. I created him, and he wrote my book, so in a sense he is me, but of course he’s also fictionalised and gifted with a lot of ideas, opinions and character traits which I certainly hope aren’t true of me, since I find them quite abhorrent). As well as that there’s a book of 15 collage-poems (mostly published in brief magazine at various times) called Jack’s Metamorphoses, which includes a set of 15 short essays on the numerous English verse translations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. So that’s three books in one: fiction, poetry and essays all bound into the one cover. But as well as that I include the Latin text of Ovid’s exile-letters from the Black Sea underneath the third section of the book, Ovid in Otherworld.

All of that is there. But of course there has to be a fictional justification for it in the world of the book itself as well. And that is basically that the (blind) almost-invisible protagonist of the whole narrative, who’s presumably dreaming up all these stories and printing them out, has accidentally started to use a set of pages which already had writing on them. He can’t see the effect, but we do. That’s also why the texts underneath are running backwards, in reverse to the flow of the top, “executive” narratives. That’s what would happened if you picked up a stack of Xeroxed pages and run it through a printer backwards.

Richard: The images, photos, symbols, diagrams and the font changes and alternations; together with trace of the subtext “behind” the main text make this book quiet visually and conceptually exciting for me. Apart from all else the very layout of the book has a kind of beauty.

Jack: I hope so. It took an awful long time to achieve some of those effects, I must say. I was on the edge of my seat till the very last minute to see how the printers would deal with that bleached-out subtext and deliberately boldened top-text. It had to be at least potentially readable to work …

Richard: You are quite interested in codes and symbols?

Jack: Yes, I guess that “being interested” in codes and symbols is putting it mildly. I’m a huge admirer of Poe’s work. The nineteenth-century French (Baudelaire and Mallarmé principal among them) were entirely correct in their assessment of his genius, in my opinion.

Richard: Is “Metamorphoses” the alternative name?

Jack: It can be if you want it to be. Strictly speaking, Jack’s Metamorphoses is the title of one of the underlying texts in the book, the collection of poems. Apuleius’s novel The Golden Ass is also called (in Latin) Metamorphoses, of course – and I guess you can see how much I’ve been influenced by it. It’s certainly in my top ten favourite books, if not my favourite of all. You can see it in this book as much as the more directly invoked Ovidian epic. So, yes, this book is the conclusion to a conversation about the idea of Metamorphosis or change conducted through all three parts of the trilogy, Bruno, Atlantis, and EMO. The titlepage of the first novel in the sequence includes a quote from an Italian book about Giordano Bruno, in fact:

II fine di tutto l’operazione è forse essenzialmente questo, modificarsi.
[The point of the whole operation is perhaps just this, in essence: self-transformation]

(15-16/9/09)

[Jen Crawford]

Complete Essay:
[reprinted by permission]

Jen Crawford. "Jack Ross's EMO." blue acres (24/6/08):

Many of you already know Jack Ross as a friend, as a teacher, as a prolific poet and fiction writer, an editor, critic, translator, publisher, blogger, and as a warm advocate for some of the more under-explored reaches of New Zealand literature. (I think the relevant epithet that turns up in EMO is “the Sheriff of Freaktown”). A number of us know that we’ve directly benefited from his work in those roles; I could say we all owe him something, because we’re recipients of the literature to which he so generously contributes his energies and talents – and without his work mapping and making that literature it would be considerably narrower.

Having said that, at first thought it seemed a little bit of a daunting prospect to introduce this book, EMO. There’s a passage in EMO where Jack describes one of his source texts, The Thousand and One Nights, as more of ‘a literature than a unified work’ – and this is also true of EMO itself. It’s more a library than a book. The book is one of a trilogy, the Random Excess Memory trilogy – yet it stands alone. Within EMO is another trilogy – the books of Eva, Mars and Ovid – or Earth, Mars and Otherworld – EMO. Behind this internal trilogy, ghosting through its pages is another set of texts – palimpsest texts – that include translations of Ovid and Sappho and Paul Celan, a comparative reading of the Thousand and One Nights, collections of Jack’s original poetry, and so on. One can also read these texts on a series of linked websites, which (as websites do), lead us on to other websites, just as the books within EMO lead us to other books, both internal and external to its pages.

In other words, this is a book which isn’t satisfied with being self-contained. It reaches beyond its own covers, beyond its author, inviting you into one of the great endangered pleasures of literature – which is the sense of its endlessness, the way one book can open another book for you, like a friend giving you a private gift; perhaps the key to a room you can now share – a room, of course, which would have many other doors.

So EMO, with its layered texts, gives us a visual realisation of the narrative manifold that is, to my knowledge, entirely unique (and I should just offer kudos at this point to both Jack and to Titus Press that this is so well realised: there’s no visual strain in reading this, which is quite a technical feat – there’s a lot of love and care gone into its production). The awareness of historical and characterological tensions that are created by these palimpsests is extraordinary. But I’m wary of making the book sound like something it’s not – it’s not a comfortable intellectual rehearsal of post-structuralist concepts.

What I haven’t mentioned yet is that ‘Eva’, the protagonist of the first book, is an android clone of Eva Braun; that the middle book is a post-Sadean detective story set on Mars, that in the third book Ovid hallucinates his exile in Auckland and his vampiric enslavement at the hands of a succubus nurse.

So it’s a very moving book.

I’m quite serious about that. Jack quotes Borges writing about The Thousand and One Nights – ‘keep reading as the day declines and Scheherazade will tell you your own story’. For all the weird schlock-genre fun that EMO allows us to indulge in, it is very much about our own stories. It’s the most outlandish fiction, and the most unsettling fiction, because it won’t quite sit down and be fiction. Or it might be more accurate to say that it won’t quite sit down and let its readers – or its writer – be real. So however much I appreciate Jack Ross’s contributions to literature, I’m no longer entirely convinced that he’s not actually a three-dimensional simulacrum of a fictional Reno private eye. Having read the fragments of Eva Braun’s diary, which Jack includes here, and having read the heartbreaking letters of Eva Android to her lost sister, Eva Braun, I’m pretty sure I know some other members of the Eva clone-clan – in fact they are disturbingly familiar.

One comes away with a deep consciousness and a deep wariness of the way that people become stories and that stories recur: Beauty and the Beast; Scheherezade and Shahryar, the wives of Bluebeard, Eva and Adolf. But Eva, however quietly, insists: she is a clanswoman, not a clone. This is one of the great beauties of this book and of Jack’s work in general. Among the stories are so many of the generic horrors, generic pleasures, generic loves we live and dream – but the generic is never blindly presented as ‘the way things are’ – nor is it dismissed as meaningless repetition. The power of its unities is openly encountered; the insistent delicate variety of its individual manifestations, and of its metamorphoses, is uncovered.

So this is a serious book. It’s a book that suggests our stories – those we return to over and over, those we read in the dead of night, those we hide under the bed – especially those we hide under the bed – are not incidental. They’re not accidents, they’re not outdated, and they’re certainly not irrelevant to the more ‘serious’ matters of our human condition here and now. I want to read you a short passage from the Mars section, where two clinicians contemplate how to interpret a patient’s story:

“It was useful to get the whole story out of her, but all it can do now is confirm that she’s been living in a fantasy world for quite some time, and that parts of it still seem quite real to her.”

“Observe and treat accordingly then?”

“You’ve got it. I was like you once, you know. Keen to take up the cudgels for each new patient – trusting their stories, hunting down the corrupt officials and cops who’d victimised them. It doesn’t make you any friends, for one thing. Nor does it really help your patients, longterm. The trouble is their stories just aren’t plausible, in the final analysis. Either you believe we live on a knife-edge of sanity in a world of seething bestial indulgence and mass-murder, or else you accept that a few wounded souls have difficulties with the stress of modern life ...”

Eva Braun’s presence in this book doesn’t really allow us to accept the second alternative as all there is to it. How we handle the possibility of the first alternative is, of course, a perennial problem. But EMO reminds us – shocks us – into a new consciousness that we are not without means, not without tools, not without a language for understanding and engaging with the full substance of our world, if we choose to acknowledge it. Because we have our stories, and our stories are talking to us.

•

Home & Away (2008)

2008-03-10T14:42:00.013+13:00

Cover photograph & design: Kathryn Lee

Home & Away: Life Writing 3. Edited by Kathryn Lee & Jack Ross. ISBN 978-0-473-13539-3. Massey University: School of Social and Cultural Studies, 2008. ii + 156 pp.

Contents:

Kathryn Lee
Preface: Writer's Block

Jack Ross
Xmas

Hayley Baines
Changes
Rules and Taboos
Seven

Bianca Burger
Home

Rebekah Chambers
Nobody Knows
Nothing but Silence
Never Again
Like You
You Were There
Melting
Tiny Black Curls
Your Face
Remember?

Bruce Craig
“Beautiful Little Dolls,” the Policeman said …

Jane Gardiner
Gardening with Granny
24 June 1977

Rhiannon Horrell
Travelling in the Footsteps of Janet White …

Emma Jeffrey
A Bus Full of Pirates

Rachel Koch
Getting Lost in Costa Rica

Kathryn Lee
Culture Shock 101: Day One in Hsin Chu

Dana Maton
Goodbye
The McGintys
Relations

Tania Menzies
Trouble in Tirau

Lisa Simpson
My German Grandfather
Goodbye

Sophie Smith
Rules and Taboos

Gregory Wood
Into the Mist: Searching for the Lost Huia

Available:

Leanne Menzies
School Adminstrator
School of Social and Cultural Studies
Massey University
Private Bay 102 904
North Shore Mail Centre
Auckland

RRP: $NZ 10 (+ $2 postage & packing)

Reviews & Comments:

Jennifer Little. "New books reveal bold approach to writing life.” Massey News. [6/6/08]

Contributor and co-editor Kathryn Lee says the publication is a testament to the courage of students who overcame fear and the inclination to procrastinate when faced with the blank page.

“The lesson that I learned from this class [life writing] was a very simple one but one that needed to be learned. Stop worrying and start writing,” Ms Lee says in her preface.

Home and Away co-editor, writer and English lecturer Dr Jack Ross says the diverse backgrounds of the contributors produced a huge variety of “amazing” stories.

“Showcasing and polishing these pieces for others to read and learn from has been a great pleasure for me.”

•

Orange Roughy (2008)

2008-01-07T12:12:00.009+13:00

Cover image: Graham Fletcher

Orange Roughy: Poems & Stories for Tazey. ISBN 978-0-473-13179-1. Edited by Bronwyn Lloyd & Jack Ross. Auckland: Pania Press, 2008. [ii] + 74 pp.

Contents:

Thérèse Lloyd / Orange Roughy

Martin Edmond / The View from Number Four

Bernadette Hall / Four Poems:
Jacaranda
A Very Short Story About Flying
In Vitro
St Declan’s Stone

Michele Leggott / Three Poems:
haukapua
te rau aroha
tapu te ranga

Bronwyn Lloyd / Two Stories:
Some Traditions
It goes like this Gordon

Thérèse Lloyd / Four Poems:
Takaka
Makara
The Eternals
We’re All Here Alive

Bill Manhire / The Secret Wife

Emma Neale / Confessional Poem

Susannah Poole / The Movie House

Tessa Rain / Three Songs:
Dargaville Museum
Dirt Poems
Town for You

Richard Reeve / Four Poems:
Sally’s Dream
The Baptism of Guthrum
Doubtful
Ode to Joy

Jack Ross / Out Being Alienated

Tracey Slaughter / How To Leave Your Family

Michael Steven / Three Poems:
Sainthood
Clerk
Event(s)

Damien Wilkins / Vancouver

Michele Leggott / from hello and goodbye

Graham Fletcher / 9 Pageworks

Samples:

Pania Press

The Imaginary Museum

Reviews & Comments:

Damien Wilkins. Email correspondence. (c. 12/07):

"Better than a sausage sizzle in front of the Warehouse."

Raewyn Alexander. Magazine (2008):

The book, Orange Roughy, named after one of Lloyd's poems, is beautifully produced as a limited edition with a hand-painted cover. The stories and poems would intrigue many people. My editor bought three copies, with two for presents later on in the year. They're already in their own decorated envelope and well worth the $25-.

•

Landfall 214 (2007)

2007-11-05T09:15:00.008+13:00

Cover illustration: Emma Smith

Landfall 214: "Open House" (November 2007). ISBN 978 1 877372 93 3. 208 pp.

Contents:

Jack Ross / Editorial: Rules of Engagement

Tracey Slaughter / consent

Amy Brown / Siamang

Tourettes / The Orphanage for Lost Pets

Jennifer Compton / Broken House

Kim McBreen / I’m Alright

Keith Westwater / Now on at a court/house near you

Katherine Liddy / Two poems

Breton Dukes / The Herd

Gabriel White / Tongdo Fantasia

Jen Crawford / Three poems

Thérèse Lloyd / Three poems

Olivia Macassey / Three poems

Martin Edmond / from White City: The Autobiography of Ernest Lalor Malley

Sarah Jane Barnett / The Drop Distance

Elizabeth Smither / A way of teaching history

Kirsten Warner / Homeboy

Ouyang Yu / The Axis of Exiles: Writing and Teaching between China, Australia and New Zealand

Claire Talbot / Hitlerjunge Quex

Stephen Turner / Make-over Culture and the New Zealand Dream of Home

Stu Bagby / Two poems

Tony Beyer / Autumn in Jerusalem

Scott Hamilton / Mr Chick

Hamish Dewe / Landscape Paintings Always Lie

Paul Millar / Walking with Rush

Michael Steven / Two poems

Richard von Sturmer / Dreaming with words

Robert James Berry / Scheherazade

Sally Ann McIntyre / Two poems

Emma Smith / Kabuki Rain

Bronwyn Lloyd / Sink or Swim

Leonard Lambert / Mystery Channel

Mary Macpherson / The Costume

Michael Harlow / Two poems

Sarah Broom / Monochrome

Andrew Slattery / Lithographone

Ted Jenner / A Miller’s Chaff: Malawi 2004-2007

David Howard / Two poems

Brett Cross / the alchemist’s notebook

Latika Vasil / Sleep

Raewyn Alexander / I feel a garage sale arriving

THE LANDFALL REVIEW

POETRY

Sarah Broom / Conversation and Trickery Dickery - Jessica Le Bas: Incognito & Richard Taylor: Conversation with a Stone

Siobhan Harvey / To the Moon and Sun, and Back - Scott Hamilton: To the Moon, in Seven Easy Stages & Andrew Johnston: Sol

Tracey Slaughter / How the Raptures Slip - Janet Charman: Cold Snack & Will Christie: Luce Cannon

Jack Ross / The Need to Gather Stones - Fiona Farrell: The Pop-up Book of Invasions & Geoff Cochrane: 84-484

FICTION

Jen Crawford / Possibilities at Play - Bill Direen: Song of the Brakeman & Jack Ross: The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis

CULTURAL COMMENTARY

Scott Hamilton / A Book with No Class - Jane Stafford & Mark Williams: Maoriland

Jack Ross / At the Revival Meeting - Martin Edmond: Waimarino County and Other Excursions

Laurence Simmons / On Reading On Reading - Lydia Wevers: On Reading

Contributor Notes

Matthew Kelly / Gag Time Funnies

Samples:

The Imaginary Museum

Reviews & Comments:

Richard Reeve. "Landfall - forthcoming issue." Otago University Press. (21/9/07).

After a number of themed issues, Landfall opens up in a general issue, presenting new voices in poetry and fiction alongside more established writers. Prose writing includes Ted Jenner on Malawi, Stephen Turner on cultural plagiarism and the New Zealand dream of home, Bronwyn Lloyd on doppelgänger suicide, and Ouyang Yu on ‘the axis of exiles’.

Lynn Freeman. "The Bookshelf: Landfall - Open House." Radio NZ National: Arts on Sunday. (2/12/07) [five minute downloadable interview with Jack Ross, available online for four weeks from the date of broadcast].

JR: "My own feeling is that much more emotional, much more challenging, much more extreme work is becoming more common ..."

Linda Herrick. "Christmas Crackers - Landfall 214: Open House." Weekend Herald: Canvas (8/12/07): 16.

Guest editor Ross has compiled a diverse range of stories, poems, photos, essays and book reviews which, when you start to read them, are actually a bit creepy. Keith Westwater's poem Now on a court/house near you is an all too familiar three-part inter-generational horror story of domestic violence and child abuse. It's like reading a crime report in the paper. "Tourettes" poem The Orphanage for Lost Pets is about "the stars of last Christmas" who've been dumped by their owners. None of that this Christmas (or any time of year).

•

Chronology & Comments

2007-10-22T09:27:00.063+13:00

[On the Mekong River (7/1/02)]

Contents:

1962 - Born in Auckland (6 November)

1967-72 - Murrays Bay Primary School

1973-74 - Murrays Bay Intermediate School

1975-79 - Rangitoto College

1980-81 - Holiday Job: helped to run a children’s holiday programme

1981-85 - Holiday Job: processed mortgage applications in the Post Office Savings Bank

1984 – BA in English / Italian (Auckland University)

1985 – (co-winner) Fowlds Prize: Best Student, Auckland Arts Faculty

1986 - Taught tutorials on Chaucer and Shakespeare at Auckland University

1986 – MA in English, with 1st class honours (Auckland University) - Thesis: The Early Novels of John Masefield, 1908-1911

1986-1990 – Commonwealth Scholarship to Edinburgh University

1989-90 - Tutored Fourth-year Honours classes on Early Modernism

1990 – PhD in English and Comparative Literature (Edinburgh University) - Thesis: An Elusive identity: Versions of South America in English Literature from Aphra Behn to the Present Day

1991 - Taught English literature full-time (Massey - Palmerston North)

1992-95 - Taught English literature full-time (Auckland University)

Since 1996, I’ve been working as a freelance writer and editor, while continuing to teach part-time (Academic and Creative writing) on Massey’s Albany campus.

1998-1999 - co-editor of the Pander (with Vanessa York, Andrew Forsberg, Chris Barker et al.)

1999-2003 - co-editor of Spin (with Leicester Kyle, Catherine Mair, Bernard Gadd, Patricia Prime & Tony Chad)

2002 – shortlisted for the Landfall Essay Prize (“A Strange Day at the Language School”)

2002-2005 - managing editor of brief

2003-2006 - co-ordinator (with Wensley Willcox) of the North Shore branch of the NZ Society of Authors.

Since 2003 - co-director (with Jan Kemp) of the Aotearoa New Zealand Poetry Sound Archive

Since 2005, member (with Brett Cross, Scott Hamilton, Richard Taylor & Claudia Westmoreland) of the brief publication committee

Since 2006, co-director (with Bronwyn Lloyd) of Pania Press

2007-2009 - member (with Jenny Lawn, Graeme Macrae & Eleanor Rimoldi) of the editorial board of the Social and Cultural Studies monograph series

2007 - Guest editor of Landfall 214: "Open House"

2009 - Guest editor of Poetry NZ 38, featuring Jen Crawford.

2009-2011 - Chair of the editorial board of the Social and Cultural Studies monograph series

2010 - Guest fiction editor of Bravado 19 (Tauranga).

[with Brett Cross & Bill Direen (Anzac Day 2005)]

Interviews, Reviews & Comments

Mair, Catherine. "Poetry Event: TrustPower Into the Light Poetry Festival, Tauranga." Poetry NZ 17 (August, 1998): 86-87.

At midday there was another bracket of readings, this time by Janice Bostock, Brian Turner and Jack Ross. … Jack Ross read translations and gave a cross-art performance using poetry and music, and deconstructing Kylie Minogue’s songs.

Paterson, Alistair. "Editorial: Jack Ross Poetry Feature." Poetry NZ 22 (2001): 9-10.

This issue features the poetry of Jack Ross, whose avant-garde interests and quirky attitude are exciting this country’s readers and critics.

Sharp, Iain. "Books: Poetic Licence – Madness, philanthropy, self-aggrandisement or a desire to startle? Iain Sharp asks why people edit literary magazines." Sunday Star Times: S’day Life & Review (1/2/04): 23.

Aucklander Jack Ross, who edits Brief (formerly A Brief Description of the Whole World), says he has a sense of mission. “I have extremely strong views on the writing I like and the writing I don’t like, and editing this magazine gives me a chance to promote the one and put into context (rather than, I hope, explicitly denigrate) the other.”

Ross says he may be unremunerated but so are his contributors. “They do it for love, which makes it easier for me to do so too. And there is a certain satisfaction in holding the physical magazine in one’s hands - each time something from nothing much, a shaped artefact from a pile of contributions, commissions, possibilities ..."

On his first poetry magazine, he received a long autobiographical poem by an American describing in detail various of the homosexual pick-ups he’d made, complete with graphic descriptions of the sex he had. “‘Nobody in their right mind would print this,’ was my first reaction. ‘It’s wildly overlength for our format; it’ll drive the subscribers (who still had a tendency to send in poems about cats and vases) insane; we might even be prosecuted for obscenity . . .’ But then the thought came to me: F–- it, I was born to put into print poems like this.’”

Hamilton, Scott. "Opening the Green Door: A Conversation with Hamish Dewe." brief 31 (2004): 56-57.

Hamish returned to China in May. Friends gathered for a send-off at the London Bar, and the inevitable tape recorder was wielded. Interrogation continued at McDonalds, where the sinister Mr Pigs made his intervention ...

[Enter Mr Pigs, wearing a tattered public school jacket and strawberry ripple tie, and wielding a rag as greasy as his hair. Imagine Rod Stewart minus a shower, a shave, and a supermodel. ...]

Mr Pigs: … Who is that bloke down the end of the table?

Scott: The one in the white jersey?

Mr Pigs: The one in the white woollen jersey. I’ve had my eye on him.

Scott: That’s Jack Ross.

Mr Pigs: He’s a complete reprobate. A complete reprobate, and a cricketer, to boot. Shake my hand son.

Leon: OK...

Mr Pigs: That’s a good handshake. Tight. Firm. [To Scott] Shake my hand ... that’s alright too, a B. You do it like men. Now look at him, at Ross Jack’s hands. Look at them. They’re little pink puffy things. You can tell a man from his hands. The size of his heart. I want a man with hands that will reach out big and strong to catch me if I fall off a cliff ... those are real hands you two have.
...
Hamish: Were there women on this jolly old tub of yours?

Mr Pigs: No ... women, but an ocean of pornography. Including the newspapers ...

Scott: Especially the newspapers ...

Mr Pigs: You see men, we’ve got this poison in us. You understand. Even Ross, Ross Jack has it. We’ve got to get it out. But that one didn’t worry me...Big Boy, the first A Bomb, they called it that. ...

Hamilton, Scott. "Field Recording at Galbraiths Alehouse." brief 33 (2006): 4-7.
Location: Galbraith's Alehouse. Auckland.
Date: 5/11/05.
Subjects: Ross, Jack. Geraets, John. Hamilton, Scott. Taylor, Richard.

Scott: I'm too lazy to write an editorial, and I thought that I could get away with a field recording at Galbraith's Tavern, with distinguished former editors.

Jack: The trouble is that your transcripts are lies. Jack says 'I'm just drunk' and the like ...

...

Jack: ... I don't have any special insight into editing. I never wanted to be a legislator. I wanted to publish stuff that seemed somehow innovative, but it had to be well-written too. And I wanted to have fun.

John: All you can do is have fun.

Jack: If this is going on record, as my last will and testament as retiring editor of brief, can I just say what a great help Michele Leggott has been? Having parts of the journal published on the nzepc she runs has helped a lot. It's nice to have that online ad, though you still have to get the physical mag –

Scott: And there's something magical about the physical journal. Holding it in your hands, sniffing the pages ... it's not the same reading stuff online.

Jack: They disappear very quickly though. They seem quite desirable – people are always looking for back issues.

Scott: We only have one copy of the last issue left …

Richard: I saw one for sale on trademe.co.nz, for big money. Collector's items. Big money, I tell you. If I could get them ...

Jack: You already have a complete set, don't you?

Richard: Yes, but I want more ...

Jack: Maybe the problem is that you're hoarding them and holding down supply?

Richard: I'm no hoarder. You don't make money on books by hoarding. Mao Tse-tung shot hoarders.

Jack: brief might fall over for financial reasons at some stage – we are constantly diving into bankruptcy – but I think it's set a lot of things in motion that will continue – for instance, we now have Titus Books, a brand new publishing venture designed to put cutting-edge writing into print. ...

John: The group thing. People intersecting. A community. It wouldn't be nearly so satisfying to publish in a journal in Europe or America, that you don't have that personal connection with.

Scott: I reckon brief should be like Dr Who. All the editors should do a reunion issue every few years, just like the different Doctors would do a reunion episode.

Richard: Alan Loney might not be keen.

Scott: Well, Tom Baker refused to join one of the Dr Who reunions, but they went ahead anyway, and used stock footage of him for the episode …

Richard: Do we have any stock footage of Loney? And anyway, what am I, if you're all Doctors? I've never been an editor.

Jack: You're a Doctor's companion. You cry out whenever a cheaply-constructed monster appears and one of us comes and rescues you.

Richard: Remember, Jack, it's Guy Fawkes – the best time of the year to shoot someone.

John: How do you guys deal with the problem of an audience?

Jack: I didn't know brief had one.

John: The problem of producing a journal for a tiny audience? A lot of people would wonder if it's worth the effort ... so much of the writing in brief is, well, resistant, it's not easy to read ...

Scott: It is is a bit of a problem for me, because I have been involved – quite heavily involved, at times – in political activism, and I believe in the importance of pieces of writing with titles like, say, 'Stop the War' or 'Oppose Brash' – I mean writing done for a mass audience, writing that communicates clearly, efficiently. But I also believe in the type of writing that brief publishes, which tends to be much more recalcitrant ... which resists easy readings. I think that in a culture of soundbites and clichés we need that recalcitrance ... at the same time, I don't like the idea of some autonomous, elite art, living in a bubble of self-referentiality. I think we need to set up a dialogue, a dialectic, between mass culture and elite culture, high art and low politics ... I don't know exactly how to do this.

Jack: I wanted to do that, to take brief in a more populist, political direction. That was one of the reasons I did the Ahmed Zaoui issue. That got quite a bit of attention. It wasn't just a matter of political propaganda, though – we were also connecting the Zaoui case to questions of language, of cross-cultural exchange, of the problems of translation ... but I thought that a process of opening up started with you, John ...

Scott: It's not a matter of demolishing the whole structure in some paroxysm of stupid anti-intellectual populism – intellectuals are very good at affecting anti-intellectual populism – but of letting a window open, letting some air in ...

Hamilton, Scott. "Jack’s Sampling." Reading the Maps [3/10/05]

Jack Ross, my predecessor at the helm of brief and the poet laureate of Mairangi Bay, has an interesting essay on Sampling up at the Titus Books site (or should I say ‘down’ at the Titus Books site – how does one give directions on the internet?). Jack has a been trailblazer for the literary form now becoming known as the ‘page work’: typically, he mixes his own writing with found texts and dismembered classics in a very clever sort of collage. And if you’re inclined to dismiss this sort of stuff as incorrigibly marginal, I’m sure Jack would take great pleasure in telling you that he’s made the cut for the inaugural Aotearoa Literary Map, published recently by the New Zealand Book Council (check out the Northland and Auckland section – Jack’s in good company...)

Cross, Brett. “A Word on Appraisals.” Titus Books Website [26/10/05]

Standing at the wine table at a local book launch where Bill Direen and Jack Ross were both launching their novellas, a large well-imbibed woman leaned confidentially over to me and pointing at Jack said ‘he’s a pervert you know, his writing’s pretty good, but he’s a deviant’ she then straightened up and took another slug of wine.

... Jack Ross does enjoy using graphic sexual imagery, however his direct usage of it is not so much a sign of sexual perversity as a perversity of a wholly different order.

It is the perversity of a writer who forthrightly claims that all material is the stuff of writing and no subject is taboo. If a particular button is considered taboo, then that is the button he will push. ‘Push on the sore point’ as he says in his latest poetry book.
...

Perverse — deliberately deviating from what is regarded as normal, good or proper (Collins 1990).

Perversion is not a goal however, if it was it would be reactive art, its deviation would be its intention. On the contrary the artistic output of both Jack Ross and Bill Direen (as with Frank Zappa, Dylan Thomas, Robert Wyatt etc) could only (by this humble author at least) be described as the natural form their artistic impulse takes. They do not set out to be weird or abnormal, and in fact do not (I would say) even consider themselves as being so, these are merely labels hung upon them by their neighbours as their work does not fall within familiar categories. ...

Hamilton, Scott. "Jack Ross, live and uncensored, tomorrow night." Reading the Maps [8/4/06]

One of New Zealand’s most prolific and iconoclastic writers will be performing tomorrow (that’s Sunday) night at Devonport’s Depot artspace, from 6.30. It costs five dollars to gawk at Jack Ross and hear his booming voice, but you will be well compensated by the pleasures his work provides, not to mention free wine and cheese.

Green, Paula. Review of the Bluff Poetry festival. In Kathy Hunter's "Food for Body and Soul." Leaf Salon [2/5/06]

... Saturday morning and Jack Ross leads a group of us in a writing activity, we are split into small groups, handed a poem in translation, an anonymous poem, a random topic, and told to come up with a poster poem. He was very cool, got us all working together for several hours, without any bickering or sulkiness. I was with Cliff, Hilary Chung, Jacob Edmond, Bei Dao’s Chinese poem (where the title is longer than the poem itself), an instantly recognisable poem by Michele, and the topic “Land’s End.” Two Chinese experts in our group, but we went for some kind of intuitive response to the “imageness” of it all and tried to make a ripple poem based on the Fibonacci number series. Felt like we were in the single-word poem without emerging into the real world for days and it was fun.

At the lunch table Jack, Richard, and I thrashed out the “how to review NZ poetry books” topic and I was one hundred percent behind Jack when he said he can’t see the point in reviewing books or poems you are tone death deaf to, whereas I think Richard prefers a more vinegary debate. When I read a review I want it to open up gateways, to broaden my reading horizons, to get me testing out new directions (but I am not up for the sycophantic reviews of little clubs) ...

Hamilton, Scott. Jack Plays Monopoly. Reading the Maps [20/6/06]

... I don’t know whether Jack Ross was intent on impressing the females in the audience, or whether he is one of that curious band of Dr Zoom aficianados and bootleg collectors, but a couple of weeks ago he mounted the stage of the Empire Bar on Ponsonby Rd and played an hour-long solo on monopoly. To the surprise of his audience, which had expected an uncomplicated poetry reading, Jack unfolded a map of Auckland with a monopoly-style grid laid over it, and proceeded to travel from his starting point - his turangawaewae, in life and in art - of Mairangi Bay to such exotic locales as Milford, K Rd, and finally the Coromandel. On the way he read a poem or two inspired by each locale.

Jack’s progress to the mystic mountains on the far side of Kopu’s one-lane bridge was not without its troubles - the instruction ‘Miss a turn, catch the bus back to Milford’ became a groan-inducing refrain, a worse fate than Monopoly’s ‘Go directly to jail’, as Jack’s attempts to escape the North Shore became a sort of metaphor for the banality and futility of earthly existence, a Kiwi corollary to Kafka’s castle or Sisyphus’s quarry.

Now Jack, who has previously insisted that ‘I’m not the blogging type - I don’t have any thoughts’, has founded mairangibay.blogspot.com and put a version of his ‘Auckland game’ there, along with a report on last week’s Titus launch. It seems to me that, unlike most poetry, or for that matter most writing of any kind, the ‘Auckland game’ is well-suited to publication on the internet. Hyperlinks are an ideal way of carrying readers from Jack’s map-board to the poems he has written about the places on this map-board. Ideally, I think, the hyperlinks would be placed on the map-board itself, not underneath it, but the template that blogspot.com gives to IT dummies like Jack and yours truly doesn’t allow for such feats of engineering.

Never mind - the Boss would still be proud...

Hamilton, Scott. "Transtromer Takes the Thumper." Reading the Maps [23/9/06]

With sixty-two votes to John Ashbery’s sixty-one, Tomas Transtromer has won this blog’s ‘Greatest Living Writer’ poll by the skin of his teeth. A bottle of Old Thumper will be going in the mail to Stockholm as soon as I have the dosh. Don’t hold yer breath, Tomas.

After taking an early lead, our own Jack Ross finished with a disappointing seventeen votes, possibly as a result of the discovery of a naughty portrait of Auckland’s most esteemed literary festival which he published very quietly several years ago. Despite his Nobel last year, Harold Pinter only took the bronze, but he will be cheered to see that two of his more obscure plays are being performed in Auckland at the moment. Orhan Pamuk struggled to get past jack, let alone Tomas, but he has worse things to fret about. Stephen King came in last with a mere three votes, which cheered me immensely. …

Murray Edmond. “Editorial Notes: I writer because I piss off.” Ka Mate Ka Ora 3 (March 2007): 82-83.

Ezra Pound’s Canto LXXIII, one of the two notorious fascist cantos written in Italian, tells the story of a bombing with a self-congratulatory pride which amounts to ‘hymning the casual slaughter of the Canadian soldiers’ as Jack Ross puts it, and, indeed, hymning the planned self-slaughter of ‘that big-boned girl’ (Pound) who leads the soldiers to their deaths. Jack Ross outlines the history of his translation of these poems (leading to his acquisition of ‘Antipodean rights’) and of the checkered history of their emergence from Italian into English to take their place in the uneven totality of The Cantos. Ross argues that these two poems, abhorrent as they are, especially Canto LXXIII, ‘are much more of a piece with the rest of the poem than readers have hitherto felt comfortable admitting.’

Pound was arrested for treason and, as Ross writes, ‘he was surprised to be told that he was regarded as a war criminal.’ It was for his broadcasts rather than his poetry that he was arrested. However both contained the same ‘tone of ill-digested rant,’ racist and pro-fascist. Perhaps it is surprising in itself that Pound, who had such hope for how poetry might affect the world, was surprised when it actually did. Poetry takes its place in the world and, to indulge a pun, carries its burden.

White, Gabriel. “Gabriel White interviews Jack Ross on his REM trilogy.” The Kitchen Table - Interviews:
- Part One (focussing on Bruno & Atlantis): 9 video clips. [30/11/08]
- Part Two (focussing on EMO): 8 video clips. [21/12/08]
- The REM trilogy Interview. YouTube - gabwhi's Channel. 17 videos. [15/2/09]
On Sunday Jack Ross came over and we did the second part of an interview about his REM trilogy, this time focusing on the final book EMO. Jack is an extremely precise and articulate speaker, which makes it almost impossible to edit anything he says – he practically self-edits as he speaks. Consequently, I have left these interviews quite long, though I may go back and rework them.

For my part this has been the most successful collaboration I’ve done with Jack, perhaps because it captures us more or less au naturel. While our collaboration or friendship has produced several tentative works, it has in actuality consisted of conversations, the best conversations of my life. It really has been a privilege to interview Jack on this ambitious work. The depth and scope of his insight never ceases to stagger me and yet he is always up for a joke or a whimsical observation. Jack is a great writer and a great person not because he’s smart or knowledgeable but because he uses his abilities to satisfy a natural curiosity.

- Gabriel White: Work Journal (23/12/08)

Leggott, Michele. “the dada lady of the sonnets.” NZ Poet Laureate blog [30/4/09]

Shakespeare’s Sonnets are 400 years old this year and the Bard himself has reached his 23 April 2009 birthday/deathday. With poet and blogger Jack Ross, our Poetry off the Page students took sonnets, scissors, real and virtual glue to remix, blog and then perform some 21st century recensions in honour of WS. The Dada Lady of the Sonnets, a video record of the occasion, puts a new spin on an old mystery, and Jack presents the exercise in full at The Imaginary Museum. Happy 445th Birthday Bill!

Hamilton, Scott. “'I have no complaints': Michael Arnold speaks from the hot seat.” Reading the Maps [4/10/09]

If you think that Graham Henry has a tough job running the All Blacks, spare a thought for Michael Arnold, who became managing editor of the long-running avant-garde literary journal brief earlier this year.

A Brief Description of the Whole World was founded by the famously cantankerous poet and printer Alan Loney in the mid-90s as a sort of redoubt within which the members of the neglected 'other tradition' of New Zealand literature could shelter from the slings and arrows of mainstream culture. When Loney's successor, John Geraets, attempted to open the publication to new contributors, and to expose the work of some of Loney's allies to criticism, he soon found himself at the centre of controversy. Angered by the accusation that their use of Maori history and symbolism was exploitative, senior Kiwi avant-gardists Wystan Curnow and Leigh Davis refused Geraets' offer of space to defend themselves and walked away from the journal.

Geraets' successor as editor was also a lightning rod for controversy. Jack Ross' determination to publish a wider range of writers in the journal which was by now known as brief soon had Loney writing an open letter to traditional contributors and subscribers. Loney had the odd sympathiser, but his call for a boycott of Jack's brief was ignored.

Undeterred by Loney's increasingly vituperative criticism, Jack worked to expand the range of brief by encouraging writers to discuss political issues more often within its covers, particularly when these issues related to the (mis)use of language. An important issue of the journal was dedicated to the case of Ahmed Zaoui, the Algerian politician, poet and refugee who was held for years without trial in the panoptic remand wing of Mt Eden prison. Jack's opposition to hysteria and xenophobia and his commitment to open, pluralist discourse were reflected in his publication of multiple translations and analyses of Zaoui's poems.

Ross organised issues which commemorated the lives and works of Alan Brunton and Joanna Paul, two middle-aged Kiwi writers who died tragically in the early noughties, as well as a celebration of the work of the great New Zealand poet Kendrick Smithyman, who died in the mid-90s. Ross' commemorative issues were lively and various, featuring everything from memoirs and serious 'academic' essays to previously unpublished correspondence and dirty limericks.

When I took brief over in the mid-noughties I tried to emulate Jack's themed approach by producing issues dedicated to exile and to war. The war issue, in particular, ruffled feathers: some admirers of a distinguished American postmodern poet didn't like the way I'd reproduced the warmongering statement that poet had placed on e mail lists in the weeks after 9/11. One long-time reader complained of the 'contamination' of the journal with 'millennial politics', and began a secret but heated campaign to part me from the editor's chair ...

Gerald Bruns, “Should Poetry be Ethical or Otherwise.” SubStance, Issue 120 (Volume 38, Number 3), 2009, pp. 72-91 (85-86):

... Not for nothing are pronouns called shifters. "I" and "you" are restless, but so are Celan's poems, whose language is arguably no longer a form of mediation but is anarchic in its Wortaufschuttung (Gesammelte Werke, II, 29) - its weird and wild way of combining and compounding words:

[There is a translation (of sorts) of "Kalk-krokus" by the New Zealand poet Jack Ross: The Poem is available online at http://titus.books.online.fr/Percutio/Percutio.htm#Celan {note - p.32}]

One can only imagine what Levinas would have made of "steckbriefgereiftes" or of the middle stanza with its smiling Sprengstoffe and die Delle Dasein which (as in Ross's rendition) should perhaps be allowed its Heideggerian resonance ("the dent of Dasein"). Meanwhile the chalk-crocus here does not appear to be a flower, though perhaps a good horticulturist could identify it.

Richard Reeve, “Romantic and Avant-Garde Personalism in Two Contemporary New Zealand Poets.” The International Literary Quarterly, 12 (August 2010):

An internationalist, Ross’s new-world New Zealand ‘I’ is pervasively historically constituted. This is manifest in the wide selection of epigraphs he chooses—from Lady Murasaki, author of the tenth-century Japanese proto-novel The Genji, to Renaissance thinker Giordano Bruno, to a fridge magnet or graffiti—and also in the translation pieces that recur throughout Chantal’s Book. Poems are diary entries, day-to-day semiotic experiments such as transcriptions of public-toilet graffiti, outcomes of the erotic context to which he has submitted himself and which his book’s dedicatory title celebrates. This doesn’t mean that the entries are artificial; however, they have certainly been guided by an ‘academic’ impulse, in New Zealand poet Kendrick Smithyman’s New-Critical sense of the term: an impulse for which ‘language [is] a force to be respected to the point where one could properly talk about the autonomy of language.’ Like the later Smithyman (1922-95), with whose work he has engaged in depth, Ross is sufficiently comfortable with the autonomy of language to display himself openly in the manner of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions as an artefact to be examined.

Green, Paula, & Harry Ricketts. 99 Ways into NZ Poetry. A Vintage Book (Auckland: Random House New Zealand, 2010):

Other poets such as Jack Ross and Wystan Curnow write poems that depend heavily upon found material and that can be traced back more readily to the Dadaist motivation to write outside a traditional aesthetic; not necessarily to produce anti-poems but to produce poetry that signals traces of anti-lyricness. Both Ross and Curnow eschew rhythm and rhyme in favour of poetic effects borne out of borrowing, juxtaposition and arrangement, yet ironically their poetry frequently exhibits aural harmonies ... Curnow's Modern Colours, a 'sampler' from a manuscript entitled 'The Art Hotel', is the composition of both the roaming forager and a finely tuned ear. The result may be viewed in the light of postmodernism's fondness for theft or bricolage (creating work out of what is at hand) and conversely through the persistent reach of lyricism. The poems may be read as musical assemblages. Ross, with an ear equally attuned to music, transports and transforms versions of the Greek lyric poet Sappho's fragments (among other things) to create love poems that he dedicates to his wife. Perhaps Ross, like [Bill] Manhire and [Hinemoana] Baker, went looking elsewhere for words to represent an astonishing hereabouts. Ross's poems, intercut with found material, tingle with sweetness, spikes and shifting centuries. [Paula Green, 'The Found Poem, The List Poem', p.116]
...
The Experimental drive has not abated and poets such as Jack Ross, Wystan Curnow, Olivia Macassey and [Will] Christie continue to push poetry to the limits of legibility, musicality, pain and pleasure because they are not satisfied by more accessible representations of the personal, the everyday or the imagined. [Paula Green, 'The New Millennium', pp.197-98]
...
Jack Ross has aptly named his blog 'The Imaginary Museum' as exploring his site is a little like losing one's way in a real museum. Ross's in-depth discussions, both intellectually challenging and highly entertaining, include teaching notes, book reviews, poems, translations, and essays on a variety of topics and poets (for example, Stu Bagby, Robin Hyde, Hone Tuwhare, [Jen] Crawford and Mike Johnson. [Paula Green, 'Digital Poetry', p.282]
...
In 2008, [Michele] Leggott and [Brian] Flaherty created a digital bridge, 'Love, War and Last Things,' for a New Zealand Studies conference at Florence. Four digital works (Jack Ross, Robert Sullivan, Paula Green, Rachel Blau du Plessis) and eight audio poems can be reached by clicking tourist spots on maps of Auckland and Florence. The project called for poetry that took advantage of digital technology by using music, animation or video footage. ... Ross intercut sound, video footage and photographs to create a digital work that gained rhythms and meaning out of juxtapositions beyond those evoked by the spoken word. [Paula Green, 'Digital Poetry', p.286]
...
Over recent decades a number of New Zealand poets have chosen to write outside the 'mainstream' and instead to create poetry that draws, in some way and to some degree, on features of experimental poetry. Magazines, at times short lived, have emerged to provide a forum for less commercial voices ... Small presses have devoted themselves to experimental writing with tiny print runs, scant publicity and production values that range from the handmade to photocopies. Additionally, poets such as [Alan] Brunton and Jack Ross have self-published.

Jack Ross writes poetry like an inquisitive magpie, a scholar, a linguist and a hot-air balloonist, and in all his writing ventures he inhabits the experimental genre on his own terms (see author inset, page 364). He draws upon an extraordinary range of sources and knowledge, raids his personal life, refuses to stick to English and sets up poetry journeys in the open air that take risks and favour the luxury of slowness. You need to spend time with the lines, to float on the page and let the wit, the cheekiness, the seriousness and the inherent love of language, despite any distrust on the part of the poet, seduce you. Chantal's Book is a book-length hybrid sequence - part diary, part scrapbook, part collage - that charts a love, a real-life love rather than a fake-for-the-sake-of-poetry love. Ross acknowledges he wanted to write the contours of this love with 'maximum honesty'; he juxtaposes samples from 'travel-books, street-signs, email, letters, advertisements, graffiti' along with his original text ('A few thoughts on sampling'). He suggests that to borrow writing he admires is a form of plagiarism, but to borrow bad writing, the world's bad copy, is a different story. In Chantal's Book, Ross includes scholarly intrusions to contextualise or clarify the writing, pockets of confession, lyrical traces and the faintly surreal. The first-person device ('I') is ambiguous. Who speaks here? The figure of Chantal is equally ambiguous, and in some ways, the steady compilation of parts strengthens her absence while foregrounding 'his' speaking presence ('It's not that you're entirely absent - just that you're not really allowed to speak, express a concrete point of view'). The poems give life to something, something acutely observed and missed and felt, but the real woman is the hollow in the text. Chantal's Book risks self-exposure, yet in its very interplay of parts warns the reader of the speaker's unreliability, of his struggle to achieve 'maximum honesty', of his tendency to duck and weave and hide. Herein lies the nub of much experimental poetry: it can't simply be catalogued satisfactorily under an all-embracing label such as 'postmodernism'. Truth is evasive but here one is granted a provisional, tentative version, Using the world's bad copy to help convey the truth of the situation alleviates the poet's reliance on his own choice of words to represent love. The end result, in contrast to some experimental work, promotes heart as much as it does cerebral talk. [Paula Green, 'Experimental Poetry', pp.358-59].

Hamilton, Scott. “Blogging and the curse of coolness.” Reading the Maps [2/1/12]

... Blogging may have been superseded by new and inferior innovations, but the medium need not die. Indeed, bloggers should treat the rise of alternative forms of online communication as a liberation, rather than a disaster. Freed from the curse of coolness, blogging can now develop as a literary and artistic genre, or set of genres. Blogging may have lost some of its old practitioners, but it should be able to attract writers, artists, and political thinkers dissatisfied with the short attention span of twitter and the ritualised onanism of facebook. Blogging may become an act of resistance against the dumbing down of culture and political discourse in the twenty-first century.

Here in New Zealand, Richard Taylor's exciting, perplexing Eyelight is exploring the aesthetic possibilities of the hyperlink, and testing the limits of the internet 'page'. On a series of quieter but equally strange sites, Jack is showing that the blog can become a sort of cultural memory bank. Ross' A Gentle Madness documents his bibliomania, while his edition of the late Leicester Kyle's lost works is bringing an important writer out of the shadows. With his insistence on publishing one seriously researched blog-essay at the same time every week, Giovanni Tiso is using blogging to make a stand against our culture's tendency towards brevity and superficiality. Over at the Kea and Cattle blog, the newly-minted Rhodes Scholar Andrew Dean has been showing that wild eclecticism and intellectual rigour can go together, as he publishes mini-essays about subjects as different as depressed cricketers, South Island regionalism, Rilke, and The Simpsons.

Like the characters in Alex Wild's first novel, today's bloggers are consciously rejecting fashion, and showing the possibilities inherent in a supposedly outmoded medium of communication.

[To the Lighthouse (Bluff Poetry Symposium, Easter 2006)]

•

Papyri (2007)

2007-10-21T16:54:00.020+13:00

Cover design: Michael Steven

Papyri: Love poems & fragments from Sappho & elsewhere. ISBN 978-0-473-12397-0. Auckland: Soapbox Press, 2007. 24 pp. [signed edition of 70 copies].

Contents:

When you walked in …
Sappho to Anaktoria
Ode to Aphrodite
Atthis
Mnasidika
Fragments (1):
- I love magnificence …
- Dying is bad …
- The Moon’s set …
Fragments (2):
- This pretty baby is mine …
– Mum, I can’t thread …
- Last night you slept on the breast …
- We love to hear …
To a girl who doesn’t care for poetry
Juicy Root
Virgin
Sappho’s Epithalamion

Samples:

Papyri

Available:

Michael Steven
Soapbox Press
47 Springfield Rd
Western Springs
Auckland
soapboxpress@gmail.com

RRP: $NZ 15

•

Cover design: Bronwyn Lloyd

(November 23, 2007) Papyri: Love poems & fragments from Sappho & elsewhere. Auckland: Pania Press, 2007. 20 pp. [gift edition of 20 copies].

Contents:

When you walked in …
The Villa of the Papyri
Sappho to Anaktoria
Recipe for Making a Dadaist Poem
Ode to Aphrodite
Life among the Surrealists
Atthis
Mnasidika
Fragments:
* I love magnificence …
* Dying is bad …
* The Moon’s set …
* This pretty baby is mine …
* – Mum, I can’t thread …
* Last night you slept on the breast …
* We love to hear …
To a girl who doesn’t care for poetry
Juicy Root
Virgin
Sappho’s Epithalamion

Available:

Bronwyn Lloyd
Pania Press
2/5 Hastings Rd
Mairangi Bay
Auckland 0630
bmlloyd@xtra.co.nz

RRP: $NZ 45

•

Reviews & Comments:

Hamilton, Scott. "Publication and Evaporation." Reading the Maps (13/10/07)

A few of the usual suspects gathered at Ye Olde Boozer last Thursday night to celebrate the appearance of Jack Ross's chapbook Papyri: Love poems and fragments from Sappho and elsewhere. Papyri is the latest publication from Soapbox Press, an oufit founded earlier this year by Michael Steven ... Papyri is dedicated to Jack's lovely fiancee Bronwyn, and its poems are a noticeable departure from the dark fare of most of his earlier books:

Some say the finest sight
on this black earth is men on horses
others foot-soldiers others
fleets of ships
I say
it's the one you love

Green, Paula. "Introduction." Best NZ Poems 2007:

When the books are as lovingly made as ... Auckland’s Soapbox Press (see Jack Ross's Papyri), the possibilities for the published poem are enhanced.
...
At one point in January the stack of best poems on my floor stood at 20 cms. I feel bad that so many of these gems remain in the shadows, so like Will in Philip Pullman’s The Subtle Knife, I want to cut a hole in the sky. My aim, however, is to reveal a simultaneous cluster of best poems:
... the fragility and the love in Jack Ross’s ‘Fragments (2) ... the more restrained edginess in Thérèse Lloyd’s ‘Feeding the Rats' ...

Jenner, Ted. brief 36 (2008) – The NZ Music Issue: 111-13:

Translation can be a peculiar practice, especially when it's of the creative variety: poet Christopher Logue produced some of the finest late 20th century versions of the Iliad in English without even a nodding acquaintance with the Greek ... Likewise, a critically acclaimed translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses was written without any knowledge of Latin; and now Jack Ross has achieved a similar feat, a rather clever and snappy set of Sapphic fragments mediated, like the Ovid, via literal translations in French prose.

[Ted Jenner: Writers in Residence (2009)]

Complete Review:
[Reprinted by permission]

Ted Jenner, “Review of Jack Ross, Papyri: Love Poems & Fragments from Sappho & Elsewhere. Auckland: Soapbox Press, 2007. ISBN 978-0-473-12397-0.” brief 36 (2008) – The NZ Music Issue: 111-13:

Translation can be a peculiar practice, especially when it's of the creative variety: poet Christopher Logue produced some of the finest late 20th century versions of the Iliad in English without even a nodding acquaintance with the Greek, and furthermore observed that based on the translations of the epic that he studied and used for his own purposes, from Chapman (1611) to Rieu (1950), an expert knowledge of Homeric Greek might even be an encumbrance. Likewise, a critically acclaimed translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses was written without any knowledge of Latin; and now Jack Ross has achieved a similar feat, a rather clever and snappy set of Sapphic fragments mediated, like the Ovid, via literal translations in French prose.

This Sappho is essentially a sheaf of love poems Jack has translated for his partner, Bronwyn Lloyd (the epigraph reads: 'When you walked in/I bearhugged you,/having banked up/the fires of love ...'). In a similar fashion, Catullus (well, it's a shrewd guess) translated one of Sappho's most famous poems, the phainetai moi ('He seems to me the equal of the gods . .') for his beloved Lesbia, a name he bestowed upon Clodia Metelli in honour of the fabled beauty of the women of Lesbos.

There are far-reaching consequences in the fact that these translations are not an attempt to represent Sappho and her 'bittersweet' yearnings as accurately as possible but rather aim to provide a partner, and thereby on publication, a public with some venerable love songs. Situations and similes are updated; hauntingly distant place-names are firmly localized in the familiar. So Sardis, the capital of the rich and powerful Lydians, becomes Golden Bay with its ‘suntanned Nelson girls'; Anaktoria, an absent beloved, is preferred to 'Mayday parades of tanks/goose-stepping infantry', not 'Lydian chariots and armed infantry'. There are gems amongst these updates. Take the love-sick seamstress, for example, who replaces Sappho's weaver singing a lament at her loom:

– Mum, I can't thread
the sewing machine today
I’m mad about
a boy …
– Again?

You won't find Mum's witty 'Again?' in Sappho's text; it is of course Jack’s own supplement, a means of breathing a little more life into this two-line remnant of an ancient traditional song.

Modernizing metaphor is a familiar strategy which creative translators adopt to give an ancient text some contemporary relevance. In his versions of the Iliad, Logue's modern references range from hairpins to Cape Kennedy, whereas Pound in Homage to Sextus Propertius limited himself to a frigidaire. But a resourceful poet can do more than this with fragments from ancient Greek if he/she wants to, in Pound's famous slogan, 'make it new’. You might for instance experiment with the 'Ode to Aphrodite' by turning it, with Tristan Tzara's 1919 recipe, into a Dadaist poem: 'carefully cut out each of the words ... and put them all in a bag. Shake gently. Next take out cutting one after the other. . .' (the reader can figure out the rest). Or you might assemble from disparate sources a collection of Sappho's famous comparisons ('whiter than milk', 'smoother than water' etc. etc.), add 'swifter than porsche' for good measure, entitle the poem 'Virgin' after a characteristic persona in the lady's epithalamia, and end with a suitable caution, 'keep away from trash', this being your own transformation of the ancient proverbial rubric, 'don't move gravel' (or 'Don't prod the/beach rubble' in Mary Barnard's translation, an image to tickle the fancy of a New Zealand reader if ever there was one!). I must admit that I find Jack's procedure here, for constructing a new poem out of one-line fragments, more creative than many so-called original poems which would ask us to contemplate the brevity of life.

Another strength of this little book is its complete lack of deference to illustrious 20th century translators and adaptors of Our Lady of Lesbos. Guy Davenport in Archilochus Sappho Alkman (1983) incorporated Pound's tiny poem/squib 'Papyrus’ ('Spring .... /Too long ..../Gongula ... .') in his own translation of fr.95 with the excuse that 'the misreading, if misreading it is, is by this time too resonant to change'. There is no genuflection to Uncle Ez. in Jack's opusculum. The very cover (designed by poet Michael Steven) seems to signal this vein of sassy irreverence (no kowtowing to Classical scholarship in here, mate): the word PAPYRI looks as if it has been stenciled on a creamy, off-white background by someone wielding a lipstick, the bright red colour of which is fading already in two or three letters (in sympathy with the word itself? or with the contents to follow?).

Where Jack falters is in his occasional omissions and his uncharacteristic refusal to supplement or transform. This, for instance, is just a mite too bald and the 'ditto' a little too flippant; it reads like a cellphone text:

The Moon’s set
ditto the Pleiades
it 's midnight
I’m alone

What he has omitted is the half-line 'hour passes hour' which endows the following (last) line with such pathos. As Pound said of a Chinese poem – The Jewel Stair’s Grievance – quite as understated as this: ‘The poem is especially prized because she utters no direct reproach.' Without the expression of tedium, the girl's (or Sappho's) loneliness loses more than pathos; it loses coherence to the extent that the lines might almost be an invitation to an illicit lover ('It's dark and quiet. Come now. I'm alone'). My main complaint, however, concerns the many fragments that have not found a place in Jack's book, but this complaint could be regarded as hypercritical when the sins of commission more often outweigh the sins of omission these days.

[Ted Jenner: Sappho Triptych (2007)]

•

Love in Wartime (2007)

2007-10-21T16:51:00.017+13:00

Cover Image & design: Bronwyn Lloyd

Love in Wartime. Wellington: Pania Press, 2007. 20 pp. [signed edition of 30 copies].

Contents:

Carl sniffed
1 – Porphyry skyline
2 – Rhinoceros
3 – Entering the world again
SEX is natural
4 – Bright Flowers
5 – You just don’t have the sympathy
6 – Stops when you watch it

Samples:

Pania Press

Available:

Pania Press
2/ 5 Hastings Rd
Mairangi Bay
North Shore City 0630
Auckland

RRP: $NZ45 (postage included within NZ)

•

Cover image & design: Bronwyn Lloyd

(December 25, 2006) Love in Wartime. Wellington: Pania Press, 2006. 20 pp. [gift edition of 10 copies].

Contents:

Carl sniffed
1 – Porphyry skyline
2 – Rhinoceros
3 – Entering the world again
SEX is natural
4 – Bright Flowers
5 – You just don’t have the sympathy
6 – Stops when you watch it
The Miracle

Reviews & Comments:

Jurgen Wegner, “The Pania Press.” Brandywine Bookman’s Repository for Australia & New Zealand #30 (January 2011): 9-10:

From the illustrations provided on the “blog” the texts seem professional enough but the cover designs are really delightful. Each one is an experiment in design and production. I especially like the use of such things as sewing machine stitching not only as part of the design but as a means of creating whole illustrations*. An example of the latter is in the covers for Jack Ross’ Love in wartime. Produced in a limited edition of 30 signed copies, each of the 10 specials has its own sewn illustration from cup and saucer to flower pot motif ...

* Ever since my own experimental portfolio of P.J. Proudhon’s What is government (Sydney : Blackdawn Press, 1986) which used a ripped and torn collage of papers, tickets, forms, &c, and sewing machine stitching for illustrations.

•

A Bus Called Mr Nice Guy (2005)

2007-10-21T11:06:00.009+13:00

Cover photograph: K Ramanathan / Cover design: Jack Ross
(Mumbai, India - 15/1/02)

A Bus Called Mr Nice Guy. ISBN 0-473-10526-8. Auckland: Perdrix Press, 2005. [ii] + 50 pp. [Signed edition of 50 copies].

Contents:

Letter to Gabriel White
Mysore:
- Timekeeper to the nation
- Black eyebrows nose
Bangalore (i):
- It was waiting for me
- Is it on the outside?
Bangalore (ii):
- Soon to be full six
- Self-conscious in a chair
Pondicherry:
- Long live classical divine Tamil
- As crêpes they’re crap
Thanjavur:
- Always in a crowd
- Put that pen away
Madurai:
- Once is never enough
- Not knowing where we’re going
Kodaikanal:
- Van Allen Hospital
- Black cow lies in the road
Kodai / Kanyakumari:
- Is this going to stay
- They like to see me writing
Cape Comorin:
- The deer doesn’t enter
- He is not a man
Trivandrum:
- They can make anything
- Haunted eyes
Kathakali:
- A lot of action
- This is my first
Varkala:
- Meine Damen und Herren
- The tank’s refilled
Quilon / Alleppey:
- No-time the expanse
- Helping the Down Trodden
Fort Cochin:
- Harbour full of islands
- How do you like Kochi?
Ernakulam:
- Human contact
- Do I exaggerate?
Kochi / Bangalore:
- Light on the tracks
- One’s the buffoon
Bangalore / Panjim:
- The hooded horror
- Sophie Marceau
Panjim:
- Fishermen
- Inside the cabin
North Goa:
- I’ve caught up with myself
- Palolem Vagatur
Madgaon:
- Is it the moment?
- Ahead of myself
Madgaon / Bombay:
- White herons taking flight
- Life must go on
Bombay:
- That is the biggest
- I can laugh about it now
Auckland:
- New construction Amcare
- An alien species
A B C

Samples:

Perdrix Press

Available:

Perdrix Press
6A Hastings Rd
Mairangi Bay
North Shore City 0630
Auckland

RRP: $NZ 20.00

photograph: Jack Ross
(Bangalore, India - 22/1/02)

Reviews & Comments:

Raewyn Alexander. Takahe 57 (2006): 59.

Prose, poetry, observations and quotes conjure up through their vivid everyday otherness, a sense of travelling along with Ross through India ... This book speaks of travel, danger, poverty, oddities, commerce and friendship, and in its fractured elegance evokes a picture of one man’s experience in a land quite foreign to him.

•

The Perfect Storm (2000)

2007-10-21T11:05:00.009+13:00

Cover photograph & design: Gabriel White

The Perfect Storm. Video by Gabriel White, Text by Jack Ross. ISBN 0-473-07350-1. Auckland: Perdrix Press, 2000. 8 pp. [12 minutes / 100 copies].

Contents:

Fire
Grating your hand …
The Storm
Don’t want no plot …
Fusion
Not the butterfly-collector …
Poetry Live

Samples:

Haibun Today

Online Text:

Perdrix Press

Available:

Perdrix Press
6A Hastings Rd
Mairangi Bay
North Shore City 0630
Auckland

RRP: $NZ 10.00

Reviews & Comments:

•

A Town Like Parataxis (2000)

2007-10-21T11:04:00.008+13:00

Cover photograph & design: Gabriel White

A Town Like Parataxis. Text by Jack Ross, Images by Gabriel White. ISBN 0-473-07104-5. Auckland: Perdrix Press, 2000. 22 pp. [100 copies].

Contents:

Swallows and Amazons
Cheating Heart
A Town Like Parataxis:
1 – Winter’s Tale
2 – Walking Home on a Clear Evening
3 – Wysiwyg
At the Warhol Look Exhibition
Stories we tell ourselves: At the Richard Killeen Retrospective

Online Text:

Perdrix Press

The Imaginary Museum

Available:

Perdrix Press
6A Hastings Rd
Mairangi Bay
North Shore City 0630
Auckland

RRP: $NZ 10.00 [out of print]

Reviews & Comments:

Mark Pirie. JAAM 15 (2001): 200.

This is a photocopied publication of text and images, the text of which is by an author currently establishing himself as an interesting and adventurous contributor to our literature (see for instance his experimental novel Nights with Giordano Bruno [Bumper Books, 2000] or his excellent guest slot in Poetry NZ 22 [2001].

•

The Britney Suite (2001)

2007-10-21T11:03:00.015+13:00

Cover design: Jack Ross

The Britney Suite, by Paul Celan, Wendy Nu & Jack Ross. Auckland: Perdrix Press, 2001. 24 pp. [gift edition of 20 numbered copies].

Contents:

[Paul Celan:] SCHNEEPART, gebäumt, bis zuletzt …(22/1/68)
Snowpart
[Wendy Nu:] keith partridge y yo
[Paul Celan:] ERZFLITTER, tief im … (20/7/68)
Orespark
Nouvelle vague
[Paul Celan:] KALK-KROKUS, im … (24/8/68)
Chalk-Crocus
[Wendy Nu:] mr darling writes to penthouse forum
[Paul Celan:] DAS GEDUNKELTE Splitterecho … (5/9/68)
Dark
It’s always too late …
[Paul Celan:] BEIDHÄNDIGE Frühe … (29/9/69)
Both-Handed

Online Texts:

Perdrix Press

The Imaginary Museum

Available:

Perdrix Press
6A Hastings Rd
Mairangi Bay
North Shore City 0630
Auckland

[out of print]

•

Cover image: Gabriel White / Cover design: Jack Ross

The Britney Suite, by Paul Celan, Wendy Nu & Jack Ross. Auckland: Perdrix Press, July 2003. 60 pp. [gift edition].

Contents:

[Paul Celan:] SCHNEEPART, gebäumt, bis zuletzt …(22/1/68)
Snowpart
[Wendy Nu:] keith partridge y yo
[Paul Celan:] ERZFLITTER, tief im … (20/7/68)
Orespark
Nouvelle vague
[Paul Celan:] KALK-KROKUS, im … (24/8/68)
Chalk-Crocus
[Wendy Nu:] mr darling writes to penthouse forum
[Paul Celan:] DAS GEDUNKELTE Splitterecho … (5/9/68)
Dark
It’s always too late …
[Paul Celan:] BEIDHÄNDIGE Frühe … (29/9/69)
Both-Handed

Online Text:

Papyri

Available:

Perdrix Press
6A Hastings Rd
Mairangi Bay
North Shore City 0630
Auckland

[out of print]

•

[Britney Spears (1998)]

Reviews & Comments:

Nick Alexander. "Jack Ross reading (13 March 2001)." Auckland Poetry Website [http://nicholasalexander.com/nda/poetry/aklive/reviews.html] (12/4/01).

Jack Ross has the credentials of a modernist, complete with German quotes translating the lines of the poem into a second voice, a second set of meanings, reminiscent of Eliot. Exalting Britney Spears and her pouting sexuality seems dangerous ground. Indeed there were sighs/groans as Jack sellotaped her image behind himself as a very unremarkable diminutive ghetto blaster provided a near complete absence of atmosphere – technical infancy maybe but the poetry was certainly riveting stuff.

An engaging and interesting reading and parody of multimedia. As the NASDAQ bleeds, we may get excited over photocopies to provide a raw visual excitement.

[Paul Celan (1960)]

•

Pound's Fascist Cantos (1997)

2007-10-21T11:02:00.010+13:00

Cover design: Jack Ross

Ezra Pound’s Fascist Cantos (72 & 73) together with Rimbaud’s “Poets at Seven Years Old.” Trans. Jack Ross. Auckland: Perdrix Press. [ii] + 42 pp. [25 numbered copies].

Contents:

[Ezra Pound]: Canto LXXII: Presences

[Ezra Pound]: Canto LXXIII: Cavalcanti / Republican Dispatches

Samples:

Canto LXXII: Presences

Canto LXXIII: Cavalcanti / Republican Dispatches

Online Text:

Perdrix Press

Available:

Perdrix Press
6A Hastings Rd
Mairangi Bay
North Shore City 0630
Auckland

RRP: $NZ 5.00 [Out of print]

Reviews & Comments:

John O’Connor. JAAM 12 (1999): 126-28.

… Ross’s versions are alive with Pound’s energy and convictions; they spark and jar ... It is a tribute to Jack Ross and an indication of his capability as a translator that these pieces stand fresh and intelligent even in their perversity, a perversity of which Ross is acutely aware.

Massimo Bacigalupo. "Correspondence: Pound’s Italian Cantos." Ka Mate Ka Ora 4 (September 2007): 154-57.

… Your final quotation of Cockram doesn’t seem to make it clear enough that she is misguided in faulting the moral stance of these cantos. I find it strange that many readers insist that they are inexcusable, when passages like the Jew-baiting in canto 52 are much worse than anything to be found in them. Written as they were in a turbulent period, they may be said to exhibit moderation. I would also question your calling them ‘fascist cantos’. ‘War Cantos’ or ‘Italian Cantos’ would be more appropriate. Pound’s take on Fascism was very peculiar, in fact he thought he had to explain its merits to Italians! Besides, cantos 31-71 and 74-84 are no less fascistic than these. Anyhow, I find your commentary very astute, especially concerning the opening of the Pisan cantos and Pound’s use of persona.

•

Killing Time (1997)

2007-10-21T11:00:00.010+13:00

Cover design: Jack Ross

Killing Time. Auckland: Perdrix Press, 1997. [iv] + 16 pp.

Contents:

Auckland by Night / Brussels by Day
One Version of Pastoral
The Prospect of the Bungy-Jump
On the Occasion of Wet Snow
A Road through Pylons
Killing Time
Morning at a Language School
Recovery
C. P. Cavafy’s The God Abandons Antony
Petrarch’s Laura I-III
Life in a Chinese Novel

Online Text::

Perdrix Press

Available:

Perdrix Press
6A Hastings Rd
Mairangi Bay
North Shore City 0630
Auckland

RRP: $NZ 2.00 [out of print]

•

Aubade (1987)

2007-10-21T10:55:00.008+13:00

Cover design: Jack Ross & Heather Johnson

Guillaume Apollinaire. Aubade. Trans. Jack Ross. Illus. Mark Haddon. Edinburgh: Drummond Press, 1987. 12 pp. [30 copies].

Contents:

Aubade

Illustration by Mark Haddon

Available:

Drummond Press
David Hume Tower
English Department
University of Edinburgh
Edinburgh, Scotland

[out of print]

Reviews & Comments:

•

Contemporary NZ Poets in Performance (2007)

2007-10-20T16:53:00.013+13:00

Cover image: Richard Killeen / Cover design: Christine Hansen /
Text design: Katrina Duncan

Contemporary New Zealand Poets in Performance. Edited by Jack Ross and Jan Kemp. ISBN 978 1 86940 395 9. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2007. xiv + 162 pp.

Contents:

Preface: Voiceprints

Acknowledgements

Peter Olds (b. 1944)
Waking up in Phillip Street
Doctors Rock
Elephant
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Bernadette Hall (b. 1945)
Party Tricks
The Lay Sister
Famine
Amica
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Stephanie de Montalk (b. 1945)
Tree Marriage
Northern Spring
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Alan Brunton (1946-2002)
The Man on Crazies Hill
from Waves
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Sam Hunt (b. 1946)
My Father Scything
Rainbows and a Promise of Snow
Hey, Minstrel
Plateau Songs
Bottle to Battle to Death
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Bill Manhire (b. 1946)
The Old Man’s Example
Domestic
On Originality
Visiting Mr Shackleton
Miscarriage
Valedictory
A Song about the Moon
Biography / Selected Bibliography

James Norcliffe (b. 1946)
at Franz Josef
planchette
the visit of the dalai lama
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Ian Wedde (b. 1946)
Earthly: Sonnets for Carlos 31
Earthly: Sonnets for Carlos 32
Earthly: Sonnets for Carlos 35
Barbary Coast
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Fiona Farrell (b. 1947)
Anne Brown’s Song
Instructions for the Consumption of Your Humanitarian Food Package
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Keri Hulme (b. 1947)
from Fisher in an Autumn Tide
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Murray Edmond (b. 1949)
Voyager
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Jan Kemp (b. 1949)
Against the Softness of Woman
Jousting
The Sky’s Enormous Jug
Sailing Boats
‘Love is a babe …’
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Cilla McQueen (b. 1949)
Living Here
Fuse
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Bob Orr (b. 1949)
The X
A Country Shaped like a Butterfly’s Wing
Ballad of the Great South Rd
Eternity
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Geoff Cochrane (b. 1951)
Spindrift Sunday
1988
Zigzags
Atlantis
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Bill Sewell (1951-2003)
Jahrhundertwende
Riversdale
Breaking the Quiet
Censorship
Biography / Selected Bibliography

David Eggleton (b. 1952)
Poem for the Unknown Tourist
Teen Angel
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Graham Lindsay (b. 1952)
Playground
Cloud silence
Life in the Queen’s English
Chink
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Iain Sharp (b. 1953)
Amnesty Day
Two Minute Poem
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Janet Charman (b. 1954)
'they say that in paradise'
ready steady
from wake up to yourself
but she wanted one
cuckoo in the nest
injection
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Paula Green (b. 1955)
greek salad
oven-baked salmon
afternoon tea with Virginia Woolf
two minutes westward
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Vivienne Plumb (b. 1955)
A Letter from My Daughter
The Vegan Bar and Gaming Lounge
The Tank
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Apirana Taylor (b. 1955)
Sad Joke on a Marae
Parihaka
Hinemoa’s daughter
six million
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Anne French (b. 1956)
The New Museology
Trout
Acute
Uncle Ron’s Last Surprise
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Michele Leggott (b. 1956)
cairo vessel
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Richard von Sturmer (b. 1957)
Dreams
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Roma Potiki (b. 1958)
Exploding Light
For Paiki
Riven
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Track List

Variant Readings

Bibliography

Samples:

Aotearoa NZ Poetry Sound Archive

The Imaginary Museum

Available:

Auckland University Press
The University Of Auckland
1-11 Short St.
Private Bag 92019
Auckland
New Zealand
aup@auckland.ac.nz
http://www.auckland.ac.nz/aup/

RRP: $NZ 45.00

Reviews & Comments:

Auckland University Press.

After the stunning success of Classic New Zealand Poets in Performance AUP and editors Jack Ross and Jan Kemp now present readings on two CDs from a later generation of 27 poets born from 1944 to 1958. These are the great poets of the 1960s and 1970s, such as Ian Wedde, Bill Manhire, Sam Hunt, Jan Kemp, Alan Brunton, as well as some whose names were made more recently such as Bernadette Hall, Stephanie de Montalk, Anne French and Keri Hulme.

Independent Publishers Group.

Chosen for their commitment to voice and performance, the poets include Ian Wedde, Bill Manhire, Sam Hunt, Jan Kemp, Alan Brunton, and Bernadette Hall, among others.

Jack Ross is a poet, editor, and comparative literature scholar whose articles, reviews and interviews have been widely published. He is the author of eight books. He lives in New Zealand.

Unireps.

This paperback and 2 CDs collects the work of 27 poets who came of age during the 1960s and 1970s, stamping their mark irrevocably on the New Zealand poetic scene and introducing new forms, new language and new freedoms. We hear the instantly recognisable, laconic but swaggering voice of Sam Hunt as he performs one of his ‘road songs’; the understated reading of Bill Manhire; the plainspoken storytelling of Keri Hulme; and the quiet humour of Cilla McQueen – lively, entertaining and moving work from some of New Zealand’s best-loved poets.

Arts Centre Bookshop

As Kemp and Ross write in their introduction, 'these recordings serve to remind us that we are not always a silent people'. Their diverse voices are a treasure.

Phillip Matthews. "Poets corner the Market." NZ Listener vol. 210, no. 357 (July 28-August 3, 2007).

Not many of these local bards deliver like grand orators – Sam Hunt’s an obvious exception – but there’s a real poignancy in hearing the voices of Bob Orr and Ian Wedde as recorded in 1974 and then again 30 years later, especially as youthful lines like “the world’s greedy anarchy, I love it” (Wedde) and “I’m leaving soon with my barefooted heart” (Orr) seem to contain all of the innocent hedonism of the 70s.

Jennifer Little. "Editor gets sound and fury of baby boomer poets." Massey News 10 (10 August 2007).

Raunchy, provocative poetry forged amid the sex, drugs and rock n’ roll era will be read and heard in a new collection co-edited by English lecturer and author Dr Jack Ross and poet Jan Kemp.

They anticipate readers will be jolted as well as entertained by verbal antics and stirring images from page one. Take the opening lines of the book’s first poem by Peter Olds called Waking Up in Phillip Street as he sets the scene: “This two-layered cake full of puking TV sets/ knife cuts & blood on the furniture” ...

Graham Brazier. "Ferries at the bottom of my garden." Weekend Herald: Canvas (11 August 2007) 29.

Contemporary New Zealand Poets in Performance is a masterpiece.

Unity Books Newsletter 30 (Winter, 2007).

To hear the poet read his or her poem aloud is to hear the poem with new ears, with a conviction, knowledge of precision and purpose in the words chosen and the subject matter explored ... A wonderful complement to the previous collection of classical material.

Sam Finnemore. Craccum 15 (August, 2007) 35.

This volume mightn’t be as safely ‘classic’ as last year’s collection, but of course that’s the point; this particular revolution isn’t over yet by a long shot ... If anything, it’s even better than its companion volume from 2006: just as comprehensive and much more cohesive, it’s a joy to read and hear.

Peter Dornauf. "Poetic Set misses some of the best." Waikato Times (11 August, 2007).

The voices range from the buttoned-down flat to the completely over-the-top melodramatic. Some strain for significance while others plump for an understated timbre. The best strike an easy, natural, rhythmical voice, full of modulation, intonation and variation in speed.

Margaret Christensen. Wairarapa Times-Age (22 August, 2007).

... the recordings (done under two separate archival schemes) are clean of surface, the poets well paced, expressive, yet individualistic. This collection is distinguished in its own right as an artefact because of its cover by Richard Killeen, its fine layout and design.

Contemporary New Zealand Poets in Performance reaches a milestone.

Sarah Johnson. NZ Writers E-zine (September, 2007).

Everyone’s guest list will be different, but if you love poetry you can be sure you are going to love this luxurious collection. Because this is what Contemporary New Zealand Poets in Performance felt like, a feast, with its only downfall being that at the end of it, you are still hungry for more. It made me feel afresh the shame that, outside of the country’s main centres, readings by any poet, let alone poets of the calibre featured here, are rare.

For if poetry is meant to be spoken, then It is equally meant to be heard, and the true value of this book may lie in its ability to bring the voices of our poets to so many more people. There is also the consolation that it is preceded by an earlier collection – Classic New Zealand Poets in Performance – and that a sequel (I assume of modern poets) is planned.

Matt Bowler. "Poetry collection a Kiwi must-have." The Nelson Mail (19 September, 2007) 41.

The two CDs that accompany the book have the poets reading their poems. Their inclusion lifts the book from an excellent collection to a national treasure. The added richness and insight of hearing the poets’ own interpretation of their works is incalculable.

Harry Ricketts. "Sounds like us." New Zealand Books(Summer 2007) 12.

Contemporary New Zealand Poets in a similar format [to Classic Poets] also contains 27 contributors. Again, the selection of poets is reasonably uncontentious though the choice of some of the individual poems seems a bit perverse. This is, after all, a record for posterity as much as anything else. ...

With the huge increase in poetry readings over the last 30 years, some voices are extremely familiar. Everyone can do a Sam Hunt impersonation, that high, blokey, love-scarred, half-chant. And Bill Manhire’s signature twist of the voice, once heard, is unmistakably audible throughout his work. But that will not always be the case. Future listeners will be grateful to hear how these poets sounded. For them it will fractionally help to close the gap between themselves and the foreign country of our own time, just as the comparable gap between us and the late 19th century is momentarily bridged by the faint, crackly 1890 recording of Tennyson reading “The Charge of the Light Brigade” in his just discernible Lincolnshire accent.

Terry Locke. JNZL 25 (2007): 174-77.

This book and its two CDs, and with Richard Killeen’s striking cover, bespeaks a number of narratives including Kemp’s. Implicated in it are poetic lives, with their victories and defeats; the ebbs and flows of cultural history, with its gaps and continuities; and above all, the survival and burgeoning of poetry as an art and craft in Aotearoa/New Zealand.

Allan Phillipson. CNZS Bulletin of New Zealand Studies 1 (2008): 298-302.

How I wish these CDs had existed four years ago, when I was teaching Apirana Taylor's "Sad Joke on a Marae" to a group of adult students in Devon. The class had been full of questions, many of which would have been answered simply by hearing the poet's voice. Taylor's tone, his pronunciation, the sad, slow, angry delivery of his words convey so much more than any explanation. To hear him cry "Tihei Mauriora" four times to the ghosts on a marae, each time with increasing anguish, would have been enough. As a teaching aid, this anthology is invaluable; an aspect underscored by Ross's own website, which supplies a list of approaches to using the book in classroom situations.

•

Myth of the 21st Century (2006)

2007-10-20T16:52:00.007+13:00

Cover illustration: Bill Hammond / Cover design: Cathy Bignell

Myth of the 21st Century: An Anthology of New Fiction. Edited by Tina Shaw & Jack Ross. ISBN 0-7900-1098-4. Auckland: Reed Publishing (NZ) Ltd, 2006. 137 pp.

Contents:

Jack Ross & Tina Shaw: Introduction

Patricia Grace: Moon Story

Martin Edmond: The Temple of Baal

Tina Shaw: Albatross

Mike Johnson: The Wedding of Psyche

Karlo Mila: One Girl Dreaming

Anthony McCarten: Futures

Tracey Slaughter: A Tree Full of Angels

Vivienne Plumb: Plumb’s Fables

Charlotte Grimshaw: The Warrior Rupapera

Jack Ross: The Isle of the Cross

Maxine Alterio: Smoking Mirror

Aaron Taouma: Half a Cup of Ava

Judith White: Finkin and Acacia

Tim Corballis: The Search for the Third Thing

Contributors

Available:

Reed Books
39 Rawene Rd
Birkenhead
Auckland

RRP: $NZ34.99

Reviews & Comments:

Steve Scott. NZ Herald Canvas (18 November, 2006) p.40.

This anthology has fused the voices of many cultures into one. It shows us how far we have come as a people, and how enriched our country is because of this. These myths serve their purpose: they make us think — they remind us of who, and where, we are.

Jennifer Little. Massey News 21 (20 November, 2006), p.10.

While there is humour and poetic beauty throughout many of the 14 stories, there is also an undercurrent of darkness and foreboding, as one might expect in contemplations of a century faced with melting icecaps and environmental disaster.

Dr Ross says that myths can have a dual and contradictory role in society.
Myths are, on one hand, “agreed-upon fictions, essentially harmless ways of arranging an experience we all share but cannot easily express”.

Conversely, they are “monstrously damaging illusions, concerted denials of the actual nature of things” such as myths of racial and male superiority.

“I think the variety in the writing reflects a truth about New Zealand. It’s a jangling, complex place, mythologically as in every other sense.”

Graeme Barrow. Northern Advocate (2 December, 2006) p.23.

It’s an interesting and eclectic collection, with some stimulating thoughts and writing, but somehow there’s a hint of the contrived about it, rather as if a class of talented school pupils had been asked to write an essay on a topic which didn’t quite grab them. …

Indulgence. The Dominion Post Weekend (27/1/2007) 16.

In the last of 14 myths anthologised in Myth of the 21st Century (Reed, pb $34.99), Tim Corballis writes: “A myth, he thought, can’t have an author.” The “authors” in this diverse collection include its editors, Tina Shaw and Jack Ross, and also Patricia Grace, Charlotte Grimshaw, Mike Johnson and Martin Edmond, among others. They were invited to speculate (truthfully, in my opinion) on what sort of mythic tales we might need in the new century.

Robin List. Wairarapa Times-Age (14 April, 2007) p.9.

The biggest myth in the book is the assumption that somehow we can, ahead of events, shape mythologies for indeterminate outcomes. That doesn’t mean that the book is futile. It can provoke serious reflection about what we are doing and how that will affect the future. And travelling with that enterprise is the interest and satisfaction of reading good writers who are trying to push the boundaries.

Jenny Argante. "Myth Fans Strut their Stuff." Bay of Plenty Times (28/4/07) 27.

The editors have put together an intriguing collection. You won’t respond to all the stories, but some will linger long alter you’ve closed this book. And if this is “new fiction” we have no need to worry about the quality of New Zealand writing at present.

Claude Lundgren. "Different, sometimes humorous, worth a look." Northern Advocate (3/11/07) 26.

... a courageous but failed attempt at the near impossible task of mythologizing the present. Myths are by nature stories that have developed over a long period of time, so creating new ones, dealing with new themes is no easy task.

•

Classic NZ Poets in Performance (2006)

2007-10-20T16:51:00.013+13:00

Cover image: Pat Hanly / Cover design: Christine Hansen /
Text design: Katrina Duncan

Classic New Zealand Poets in Performance. Edited by Jack Ross. Poems selected by Jack Ross and Jan Kemp. ISBN 1-86940-367-3. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2006. xiv + 146 pp.

Contents:

Preface

Acknowledgements

A. R. D. Fairburn (1904-1957)
Full Fathom Five
A Farewell
The Cave
Cupid
Walking on my Feet
Biography / Selected Bibliography

R. A. K. Mason (1905-1971)
The Spark’s Farewell to its Clay
Out from Sea-Bondage
Be Swift O Sun
Stoic Overthrow
Flow at Full Moon
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Charles Brasch (1909-1973)
from In Your Presence:
'I read your signature'
'Morepork, Shrewd Sentry Owl'
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Allen Curnow (1911-2001)
House and Land
The Unhistoric Story
The Skeleton of the Great Moa in the Canterbury Museum, Christchurch
A Dead Lamb
Any Time Now
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Denis Glover (1912-1980)
The Magpies
Threnody
Biography / Selected Bibliography

M. K. Joseph (1914-1981)
Drunken Gunners
Mercury Bay Eclogue I
Mercury Bay Eclogue II
Elegy in a City Railyard
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Keith Sinclair (1922-1993)
E. D. S. (1893-1969)
The Bomb is Made
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Kendrick Smithyman (1922-1995)
Communicating
Inlet
Near Ellon
Closing the Chocolate Factory
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Hone Tuwhare (b.1922)
Rain
No ordinary sun
cummings
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Lauris Edmond (1924-2000)
Before a Funeral
Scar Tissue
yellow-eyed penguin
Autumn in Canada
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Janet Frame (1924-2004)
The Cat of Habit
The Icicles
Lines Written at the Frank Sargeson Centre
O Lung Flowering Like a Tree
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Louis Johnson (1924-1988)
Singing to the Ancestors
Words for Blair Peach
The Seventies
Coming and Going
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Alistair Te Ariki Campbell (b.1925)
The Gunfighter
Home from Hospital
Lest We Forget
Maori Battalion Veteran
Biography / Selected Bibliography

James K. Baxter (1926-1972)
Poem in the Matukituki Valley
Prospector
The Fallen House
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Alistair Paterson (b.1929)
Jenny Roache Love all the Boys in the World
On reading Robert Bly’s Selected Poems while sitting at a desk near a calendar
bearing photographs of boats and shadows of boats on water
The dictionary of battles
Biography / Selected Bibliography

C. K. Stead (b.1932)
from April Notebook
Birthday Sonnet
from The Masks of Catullus
Between
Auckland
Horation
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Kevin Ireland (b.1933)
A Hard Country
Cloud
A Whiff of the Old Adam
Villanelle for a Smile
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Fleur Adcock (b.1934)
A Game
The Pilgrim Fathers
Camping
Smokers for Celibacy
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Peter Bland (b.1934)
Death of a Dog
The Nose
The Happy Army
Shopping with Brigitte Bardot
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Michael Harlow (b.1937)
No Problem, But Not Easy
Cassandra’s Daughter
Today is the Piano’s Birthday
And, yes
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Vincent O’Sullivan (b.1937)
Butcher in Sunlight
Butcher on Life in General
Still Shines when you Think of it
Elegy for a School Mate
Seeing You Asked
Before you go
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Riemke Ensing (b.1939)
Morning Glory
Love Affair
T’ai Chi
Transport
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Albert Wendt (b.1939)
Conversation
The Mountains of Ta’ū
On Our Way
Over Ponsonby
Scavengers
Bus
Bound For Whangamata
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Michael Jackson (b.1940)
Shape-Shifter
The Red Road
Seven Mysteries
Sudan
Green Turtle
Biography / Selected Bibliography

David Mitchell (b.1940)
my lai / remuera / ponsonby
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Elizabeth Smither (b.1941)
Red shoes
Smoking with Carol
Saveloy
Listening to The Goldberg Variations
Late Summer Dew
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Brian Turner (b.1944)
Trout
Training on the Peninsula
Fish
Pig
One Night Stand
In the Swim
Biography / Selected Bibliography

Track List

Variant Readings

Bibliography

Samples:

Aotearoa NZ Poetry Sound Archive

The Imaginary Museum

Available:

Auckland University Press
The University Of Auckland
1-11 Short St.
Private Bag 92019
Auckland
New Zealand
aup@auckland.ac.nz
http://www.auckland.ac.nz/aup/

RRP: $NZ 45.00

Reviews & Comments:

Christopher Moore. "Book News." The Press (24 June, 2006) Edition 2, p.13.

There are two ways of looking at Auckland University Press’s Classic New Zealand Poets in Performance (softcover $45). The first is to read this new anthology of works by 27 New Zealand poets. The second is to listen to recordings of them reading their works. The book and the CD, due for release on Montana New Zealand Poetry Day 2006 (July 21), “brings a new resonance to bare words and familiar texts,” according to its editors, Jack Ross and Jan Kemp.

Mary de Ruyter. "Music & Books." citymix (1 July, 2006), p.58.

Who needs bedtime stories when you can be serenaded by some of New Zealand’s leading poets?

Iain Sharp. "Books: From New York no-no’s to a chorus of Kiwi classics." Sunday StarTimes (2 July, 2006), p. C7.

For anyone interested in New Zealand poetry, this is a must-have.

Jennifer Little. Flurry of publishing for writing lecturer.Massey News 9 (6 Pipiri / June) 8.

The book features a cover image by artist Pat Hanly and comes with two CDs of recordings of 27 of New Zealand’s most celebrated poets — including James K Baxter, Denis Glover, Hone Tuwhare, Janet Frame, Fleur Adcock, Kevin Ireland and Vincent O’Sullivan — reading their own work.

Dr Ross has been collecting and compiling the poetry texts and recordings with co-editor and poet Jan Kemp since 2004. The material comes from the Waiata Recordings Archive, collected in 1974, and the Aotearoa New Zealand Poetry Sound Archive, completed in 2004. The book with sound recordings is the first of its kind for New Zealand poetry.

Scott Hamilton. "Better than Deaker." Poetry NZ 33 (2006): 101-103.

For sheer entertainment value, Ross and Kemp’s anthology easily beats Murray the Mouth, let alone that Harry Potter rerun on TV 2. Who says poetry is dead?

Trevor Reeves. Southern Ocean Review 40 (12 July, 2006).

It is easy to see that this book will become a well respected text for teaching, in years to come. However, just as a book to have, and enjoy for all the good work in it, it is fine, and worthwhile. You need to add this book to your collection.

Peter Wells. "In Praise of the Poetic Voice." Weekend Herald: Canvas (15 July, 2006) 31.

The book, and the CDs, are taonga. The result of a mission by poets Jan Kemp and Jack Ross, they reproduce the poetic voices of our past ... But what is the bigger story of this collection? It is a treasure of voice and poem. I am hoping it is the beginning of a longer series. Every school should have one. There is much to ponder on, to celebrate here. And people searching for poems for significant occasions could do well to buy this book. It is of our people.

Chris Price. "A sound selection." The Dominion Post: Indulgence (15 July, 2006) 16.

... this two-CD set plus book — reproducing the poems as read, not always as they were published, along with serviceable biographies and bibliographic detail — is well worth the price of admission. Listen in the car, while you’re making dinner, or do the iPod shuffle. The fact that 15 of the 27 writers represented are still cruising our poetic high ways is also a timely reminder, in the run up to Montana Poetry Day, to get out and see a classic live while you still can.

Charmian Smith. "Poets make fascinating listening." Otago Daily Times: Weekend Mag (15-16 July, 2006) 5.

Listening to a poet reading his or her own work brings a layer of meaning and enjoyment that you can’t get from the printed page.

Terry Locke. English in Aotearoa.

For the classroom teacher, who cares about our literary heritage, this collection is a treasure trove, something to share with students or, on a long drive, to keep you company with poems that you will simply want to return to.

Jenny Lawn. "Congratulations." School News. SSCS:
[http://sscs.massey.ac.nz/news.htm#top].

Congratulations to Jack Ross who has a new book/CD out. This is a 2-CD set of 27 classic New Zealand poets, from Fairburn to Brian Turner, reading their own work. The CDs are accompanied by a book of the texts of the poems reproducing them exactly as read, as well as brief biographies and bibliographies of each poet.

Sam Finnemore. Craccum (17 August, 2006).

If I was forced to pick a downside in this release, I’d single out the dodgy pack aging of the CDs themselves — tucked into fragile paper envelopes inside the book’s covers, they’re vulnerable to damage, and somewhat spoil the over all presentation. My advice is to pop them into spare plastic jewel cases from a friend’s CD collection and save your self hassle and heartbreak. Otherwise, Classic New Zealand Poets in Performance is an essential purchase for any follower of New Zealand literature.

Linda Herrick. "Fineprint: Poets Sell Out." Weekend Herald: Canvas (August 26, 2006) 33.

If you are looking for a copy of Classic New Zealand Poets in Performance, Auckland University Press’ enchanting collection of poetry matched with a double CD of the actual poets reading their works, it has sold out. AUP confirms that a second “rush imprint” is underway in Singapore, and copies should be available in bookshops in about two weeks.

Graham Reid. "Word Up." NZ Book Month. (10/9/06)

I am pleased by the success of the recent double CD Classic New Zealand Poets in Performance, put out by AUP and compiled by Jan Kemp and Jack Ross. The first run has sold out and another is under way.

But you know about that one, right?

Alastair Campbell. Wairarapa Times Age (September, 2006).

... although the recordings prove yet again that writers don’t always make good readers and there could be some argument with the selection, there are really wonderful moments that will rekindle memories among older listeners and introduce to younger ones the authentic voice of many canonical poets.

Jennifer Little. Massey Research 3 (13 October, 2006).

Jack Ross has spent much of the past two years hearing voices.
Haunting, poetic voices. The voices of Janet Frame, of James K Baxter, of A. R. D. Fairburn, of Denis Glover, of Hone Tuwhare, of Fleur Adcock.

Classic New Zealand Poets in Performance, co-edited by Mr Ross and poet Jan Kemp, includes two CDs of recordings, totaling two hours of poetry readings by 27 of the country’s major poets.

Peter Dornauf. Waikato Times (23 September, 2006).

What is noticeable is that the women represented in this collection do a better job than the men. Fairburn has a weary, flat, monotonous tone while Mason’s voice is too high and fails to carry the gravity of his message. Brasch’s 1950s polished English voice has perfect intonation but sounds terribly dated. Even Tuwhare, like Baxter, comes across as wooden and awkward. In contrast, poets like Lauris Edmond and Fleur Adcock communicate in an unpretentious relaxed manner without strain, employing an easy natural rhythm that captures perfectly the correct intonation, emphasis, speed and resonance. The best of the men are Peter Bland, Michael Harlow and Vincent O’Sullivan. The latter’s Elegy for a School mate is conveyed with just the right mix of understated passion and pathos.

"Counter intelligence." Booksellers News (December 2006) 19.

While poetry doesn’t necessarily do well at the shop, this collection is a stand out, in part because of the two CDs that accompany it. The collection has wide appeal in part because it features major poets, and also because it offers readers a unique opportunity to hear our best poets reading their own work. A perfect pressie for the poetry enthusiast.

Harry Ricketts. "Sounds like us." New Zealand Books (Summer 2007) 12.

So far as I am concerned, Jack Ross and Jan Kemp have done local poetry lovers a good turn with these two collections of our own poets reading their work. Classic New Zealand Poets in Performance runs from A. R. D. Fairburn to Brian Turner, Contemporary New Zealand Poets in Performance from Peter Olds to Roma Potiki. Each collection is handsomely designed and, to accompany, two CDs of the poets’ voices, contains the text of the poems plus brief biographical and bibliographical details. (A third collection, presumably of younger voices, is promised).

Jacob Edmond. "Not so Hopped-Up." JNZL(2007) 164-73.

While, as Davidson suggests, the movement of poetry off the page potentially implicates it in ‘realms of community, contingency, and conversation’, Classic New Zealand Poets in Performance presents poets whose performance styles or the contexts in which they are recorded often seem isolated from such conversations, more at home in Hollander’s vision of the lyric as a carefully crafted well-wrought urn’ than in Ginsberg’s improvisatory style. While a more ‘hopped-up’ set of recordings might have opened eyes and ears, radiant and cool or otherwise, to New Zealand poetry as a socially engaged, community practice, Classic New Zealand Poets nevertheless provides an invaluable contribution to such an opening simply by reminding us that in poetry voice and ear are at least as important as text and eye.

•

Where Will Massey Take You? (2005)

2007-10-20T16:49:00.006+13:00

Cover photograph: Simon Creasey / Cover design: Sarah Grimes

Where Will Massey Take You? Life Writing 2. Edited by Jack Ross. ISBN 0-473-09551-3. Massey University: School of Social and Cultural Studies, 2005. viii + 155 pp.

Contents:

Jack Ross
Where Will Massey Take You?

Catherine Alexander
Diagonal Parking in a Parallel Universe:
A view from within the world of Asperger’s Syndrome

Kali Bell
Going Back
The Trigger
Despair

Rachel Bresnahan
The Sheepskin
When she was good …
Someone Else’s Story

Nathan Calvert
Interview with Farid Shafizadeh Dizaji

Jenna Crowley
The Lawnmower Man
Us
Friends
Six-Legged Fear

Erin Gallagher
Schools

Justine Giles
Mirror people
Old man, little boy

Anaise Irvine
Families

Anna Leclercq
Patagonia
Bomb Blast

Erica Marsden
What to do?

Katie Ranby
Great-Grandmother’s Poetry

Phillipa Reeve
Roadside Reflections

Kelly Schischka
Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About
Dr Leslie Whetter, Mr. Weta, The Man Who
Went to Antarctica & the German Spy on The Hill

Claire Talbot
Unpardonable Sins
Trauma: Journal

Emma Zhang
Love, Time and Memories:
Liu Jing Hua, My Grandmother

Available:

Leanne Menzies
School Adminstrator
School of Social and Cultural Studies
Massey University
Private Bay 102 904
North Shore Mail Centre
Auckland

RRP: $NZ 10 (+ $2 postage & packing)

Reviews & Comments:

Jenny Lawn. "Life Writing 2." School News – Massey University website
http://sscs.massey.ac.nz/news.htm [6/10/05]
Lecturer Jack Ross has edited the second anthology of work by students in 139.226, Life Writing. The poems, short stories, and interviews gathered in the collection are varied and hard-hitting, so come to our book launch (details below) to meet the contributors and be inspired! The English programme is grateful to Sarah Grimes for the evocative cover design (from an image by Simon Creasey).

•

Campana to Montale (2004)

2007-10-20T16:48:00.012+13:00

Cover photograph: Michael Dean / Cover design: James Fryer

Kendrick Smithyman. Campana to Montale: Versions from Italian. Edited by Jack Ross. ISBN 0-476-00382-2. Auckland: The Writers Group, 2004. [ii} + 190 pp.

Contents:

Introduction

[For an updated list of poets' biographies, consult the 2010 edition]

Dino Campana

Born in 1885, near Faenza; died of septicaemia at Castel Pulci in 1932. Before being committed in 1918 to the mental hospital where he died, Campana’s life was characterised by compulsive wandering, tormented love affairs, and extreme disdain for the literary establishment. Major work: Canti Orfici (1914).
Old Florence
Firenze vecchia
from The Evening of the Fair
La sera di fiera
Campana in an Autumn Garden
Giardino autunnale
Woman of Genoa
Donna genovese
The Skylight
L’invetriata

Sandro Penna

Born in Perugia in 1906; died in Rome in 1977. A somewhat isolated figure in modern Italian poetry, Penna is generally described as the one working-class poet among the intellectuals of the Hermetic school. Major works: Tutte le poesie (1970); Stranezze (1976).
untitled
‘Esco dal mio lavoro …’
untitled
‘Il treno tarderà …’
The Journey
Il viaggio
untitled
‘Tutto il giorno passai …’
untitled
‘Con il cielo coperto …’
Morning
Mattino
untitled
‘L’ombra di una nuvola …’
untitled
‘Alfio che un treno Porta …’
untitled
‘Voglio credere ancora …’
untitled
‘Lungo è il tragitto ...’
untitled
‘Viaggiava per la terra …’
In a Small Venetian Square
La veneta piazzetta
untitled
‘Lasciami andare ...’
untitled
‘Sulla riva del fiume …’
untitled
‘Sole con luna …’
untitled
‘Se desolato io cammino ...’
untitled
‘Nel chiuso lago …’
Woman in a Tram
Donna in tram
untitled
‘Sul campo aperto …’
untitled
‘Imbruna l’aria …’
News of Spring
Cronache di primavera
untitled
‘Forse sull’erba verde …’

Nelo Risi

Born in Milan in 1920. A qualified doctor, but writer by vocation, he spent most of World War II in Russia, and was subsequently interned in Switzerland. His work concerns itself mainly with “the dilemma of the individual in an age of mass-consciousness.” Major works: L’esperienza (1948); Il mondo in una mano (1994).
Mister Risi: The Poet
Il poeta
Risi’s Tautology
Tautologia
Risi Says Muses Played Out
Le muse sono stanche

Giuseppe Ungaretti

Born in Egypt, at Alexandria, in 1888; died in Milan in 1970. He served as an infantryman in World War I, an experience which confirmed him in his vocation as a poet. With Montale and Quasimodo, one of the “big three” of twentieth-century Italian poetry. Major work: Vita d’un uomo (1969).
Quiet / Quietus
Quiete
Evening
Sera
Nostalgia
Nostalgìa
The Vigil of Ungaretti
Veglia
Agony
Agonia
Ungaretti’s Drowned Port
Il Porto sepolto

Leonardo Sinisgalli

Born in Montemurro in 1908; died in Rome in 1981. His background in physics and graphic design led him to formulate a poetry of detached understatement, in opposition to the frenzied aesthetics of his contemporaries. Major works: Cuore (1927); 18 Poesie (1935).
Children Tossing Red Coins
I fanciulli battono le monete rosse
How Sr Sinisgalli Eyeballed the Muses
Vidi le Muse

Alfonso Gatto

Born in Salerno in 1909; died in a road accident near Orbetello in 1976. He was imprisoned in Milan in 1934 for opposition to the Fascist regime, and was active in the Resistance during World War II, experiences which informed much of his later poetry. Major works: Poesie (1941); La madre e la morte (1960).
For the Martyrs of Loreto Square
Per i martiri di Piazzale Loreto

Vittorio Sereni

Born in Luino, Lago Maggiore, in 1913; died in Milan in 1983. Fought as an infantry officer in Greece and Sicily, where he was taken prisoner. His initial adherence to Hermeticism was succeeded by a more realistic approach to war and post-war austerity. Major works: Diario d’Algeria (1947); Stella variabile (1981).
Vittorio Sereni’s First Night out from Athens
Prima sera d’Atene
Airborne
Non sa piú nulla
At Six in the Morning
Le sei del mattino
Vittorio Sereni and His Great Friend
Il grande amico

Camillo Sbarbaro

Born in Santa Margherita, Liguria, in 1888; died at Spoleto in 1967. Generally seen as an adherent of the turn-of-the-century Crepuscular school, Sbarbaro’s melancholic self-absorption in fact has more in common with later poets of disillusionment such as Montale or Eliot. Major works: Pianissimo (1914); Rimanenze (1956).
Now You Have Come
Ora che sei venuta
La bambina che va sotto gli alberi
La bambina che va sotto gli alberi

Luciano Erba

Born in Milan in 1922. Scholar, translator and critic, Erba’s elaborately ironic undercutting of traditional poetic language and attitudes have helped him to build up a biting commentary on post-war Italian values. Major works: Il prato più verde (1970); Il nastro di Moebius (1980).
Luciano Erba in Lombardo-Veneto
Lombardo-Veneto
Luciano Erba Entertaining Them
Lo svagato

Mario Luzi

Born in Castello, near Florence, in 1914. An early exponent of the hermetic movement, whose motto “letteratura come vita” [literature as life] dominated Italian literature in the 1930’s, his later work is less liable to assume the capacity of poetry to palliate suffering. Major works: La barca (1935); Tutte le poesie (1979).
Mario Luzi: But Where
Ma dove
Mario Luzi on Judging
Il giudice
From (Mario Luzi) One to Another
L’uno e l’altro

Giorgio Orelli

Born in Airolo in 1921. He studied Italian literature with Gianfranco Contini at Fribourg, then went to teach in Bellinzona, where he has been living since 1945. He is onsidered by many the greatest poet of Italian Switzerland. Major works: Poesie (1953); Sinopie (1977).
The Trout
La trota

Elio Pagliarani

Born in Viserba, near Rimini, in 1927. Teacher, editor, journalist, Pagliarini’s poetry attempts to replace the conventions of the Romantic lyric with a neo-realist but linguistically complex presentation of the lives of ordinary people. Major works: La ragazza Carla e altre poesie (1962); Lezione di fisica e fecaloro (1968).
from The Girl Carla
La ragazza Carla

Lucio Piccolo

Born 1903 in Palermo. Died in 1969 at his Sicilian property at Capo d’Orlando. Like his more famous cousin Tomasi di Lampedusa, lived out of the mainstream of Italian cultural life. Major works: Canti barocchi (1956); Plumella (1967).
Lucio Piccolo’s Days
I giorni

Eugenio Montale

Born in Genoa in 1896; died in Milan in 1981. His poetry, perhaps the most influential in twentieth-century Italian literature, constantly circles back to his childhood on the coast of Liguria. Largely self-educated, he lost his job as an editor in 1938 as a result of anti-fascist opinions, and supported himself afterwards with occasional journalism and translation. Major works: Ossi di seppia (1925); Le occasioni (1939); La bufera ed altro (1956); Satura (1971).
Promenade by the Sea
Lungomare
untitled
‘Portami il girasole ...’
Intermezzo
Intermezzo
The Customs Officers’ House
La casa dei doganieri
The Eel
L’anguilla
untitled
‘Un tempo …’
Honour
L’onore
When I Began to Paint
‘Quando cominciai a dipingere …’
After the Rain
Dopopioggia
Heroism
L’eroismo
Reading Cavafy
Leggendo Cavafis
Disguises
I travestimenti
A Poet
Un poeta
On The Lake Of Orta
Sul lago d’Orta
In the Negative
In negativo
Culture
La cultura
In a Northern City
In una città del nord
The Inhuman
Nel disumano
A Dream, One of Many
Un sogno, uno dei tanti
That Woman from the Lighthouse
Quella del faro
From the Other Side
Dall’altra sponda
On the Beach
Sulla spiaggia
untitled
‘Si aprono venature pericolose ...’
Aspasia
Aspasia
A Letter Not Sent
Una lettera che non fu spedita
untitled
‘Oltre il breve recinto …’

Salvatore Quasimodo

Born in Modica in 1901; died in Milan in 1968. His Nobel prize for literature in 1959 was awarded mainly for the wartime poems collected in Giorno dopo giorno [Day after day] (1943-46), an advance on the austere Hermeticism of much of his early work. The life of the Sicilian countryside and the classical Mediterranean past are two interests which constantly resurface in his poetry. Major works: Ed è subito sera (1943); Tutte le poesie (1960).

from Acque e terre (1920-1929)

Your Dress is White
E la tua vesta è bianca
Deadwater
Acquamorta
Winter in the Old Days
Antico inverno
Sorrow of Things I Don’t Know
Dolore di cose che ignoro
The Dead
I morti
Alley
Vicolo
Refuge of the Birds of Night
Rifugio d’uccelli notturni

from Òboe sommerso (1930-1932)

Sunken Oboe
Òboe sommerso
To My Land
Alla mia terra
Word
Parola
Of a Young Woman Lying Back among Flowers
Di fresca donna riversa in mezzo ai fiori
Lamentation of a Friar in an Icon
Lamentazione d’un fraticello d’icona
Without Memory Of Death
Senza memoria di morte
Prayer to the Rain
Preghiera alla pioggia
Woods Sleep
Dormono selve
To Night
Alla notte
Metamorphoses in the Saint’s Urn
Metamorfosi nell’urna del santo
Island
Isola
Where the Dead Stand Open-Eyed
Dove morti stanno ad occhi aperti
The Angel
L’angelo
Water Decomposes Dormice
L’acqua infradicia ghiri
Seed
Seme
First Day
Primo giorno
Green Drift
Verde deriva

from Erato e Apòllion (1932-1936)

Apollyon’s Song
Canto di Apòllion
Apollyon
Apòllion
Dead Heron
Airone morto
On the Hill of the “Terre Bianche”
Sui colle delle “Terre Bianche”
In Your Light I am Wrecked
Al tuo lume naufrago
Insomnia
Insonnia
Often a Shoreline
Sovente una riviera
Ulysses’ Isle
Isola di Ulisse
Salt-Pan in Winter
Salina d’inverno
Sardinia
Sardegna
In Light of the Skies
In luce di cieli
Quarries
Latomìe
For My Mortal Smell
Del mio odore di uomo
Stranger City
Città straniera
In the Feeling of Death
Nel senso di morte

Nuove Poesie (1936-1942)

The Magpie Laughs, Black in the Orange Trees
Ride la gazza, nera sugli aranci
A Street in Agrigentum
Strada di Agrigentum
The Gentle Hill
La dolce colline
What are You up to, Shepherd of Air?
Che vuoi, pastore d’aria?
Before the Statue of Ilaria del Carretto
Davanti al simulacro d’llaria del Carretto
Now Day Breaks
Ora che sale il giorno
The Rain is Already with Us
Già la pioggia è con noi
One Evening, the Snow
Una sera, la neve
The Piazza Fontana
Piazza Fontana
The Tall Ship
L’alto veliero
Elegy for the Dancer Cumani
Elegos per la danzatrice Cumani
Delphic Woman
Delfica
Imitation of Joy
Imitazione della gioia
Moon Horses and Volcanoes
Cavalli di luna e di vulcani
Once More a Green River
Ancora un verde fiume
Beach at St Antiochus
Spiaggia a Sant’Antioco
The Scrawny Flower is Already Flying
Già vola il fiore maoro
Verging on Puberty
Inizio di pubertà

Giorno dopo giorno (1947)

Speaking about Willow Branches
Alle fronde dei salici
Letter
Lettera
19 January 1944
19 gennaio 1944
Snow
Neve
Day after Day
Giorno dopo giorno
Perhaps the Heart
Forse il cuore
Winter Night
La notte d’inverno
Milan, August 1943
Milano, agosto 1943
The Wall
La muraglia
O My Sweet Animals
O miei dolci animali
Written Perhaps on a Tomb
Scritto forse su una tomba
Pilgrim
A me pellegrino
From the Rock Fortress of Upper Bergamo
Dalla rocca di Bergamo alta
Beside the Adda
Presso l’Adda
I Have Heard the Sea Again
S’ode ancora il mare
Elegy
Elegia
Of Another Lazarus
Di un altro Lazzaro
The Crossing
Il traghetto
Your Silent Foot
Il tuo piede silenzioso
Man of My Time
Uomo del mio tempo

from La vita non è sogno (1946-1948)

Lament for the South
Lamento per il Sud
Epitaph for Bice Donetti
Epitaffio per Bice Donetti
Colour of Rain and Iron
Colore di pioggia e di ferro
Almost a Madrigal
Quasi un madrigale
Italy is My Country
Il mio paese è l’Italia
Thànatos Athànatos
Thànatos Athànatos

from Il falso e vero verde (1949-1955)

The Dead Guitars
Le morte chitarre
False and True Green
Il falso e vero verde
In a Distant City
In una città lontana
How Long a Night
Che lunga notte
Beyond the Waves of the Hills
Al di là delle onde delle colline
Near a Saracen Tower, for His Dead Brother
Vicina a una torre saracena, per il fratello morto
Laude, 29 April 1945
Laude, 29 Aprile 1945
To a Poet Not Well Disposed
A un poeta nemico

from La terra impareggiabile (1955-1958)

Visible, Invisible
Visibile, invisibile
The Incomparable Earth
La terra impareggiabile
Today, the Twenty-First of March
Oggi ventuno marzo
From Disfigured Nature
Dalla natura deforme
An Open Arc
Un arco aperto
A Copper Amphora
Un’anfora di rame
The Scaliger Tombs
Le arche scaligere
In This City
In questa città
Once More about Hell
Ancora dell’inferno
Almost an Epigram
Quasi un epigramma
Soldiers Crying in the Night
I soldati piangono di notte
At Night on the Acropolis
Di notte sull’Acropoli
Mycenae
Micene
Following the Alpheus
Seguendo l’Alfeo
Delphi
Delfi
Marathon
Maratona
Minotaur at Knossos
Minotauro a Cnosso
Eleusis
Eleusi
To the New Moon
Alla nuova luna
An Answer
Una risposta
Another Answer
Altra risposta
Inscription for the Partisans of Valenza 1957
Epigrafe per i Partigiani di Valenza

from Dare e avere (1966)

Debit and Credit
Dare e avere
Varvàra Alexandrovna
Varvàra Alexandrovna
Only If Love Stabs You
Solo che amore ti colpisca
A Night in September
Una notte di settembre
Along the Isar
Lungo l’Isar
From the Shores of Lake Balaton
Dalle rive del Balaton
Tollbridge
Tollbridge
The Negro Church at Harlem
La chiesa dei negri ad Harlem
Cape Caliakra
Capo Caliakra
Silence Does Not Mislead Me
Il silenzio non m’inganna
Glendalough
Glendalough
The Bowmen Of Tuscany
Balestrieri toscani
In Chiswick Cemetery
Nel cimitero di Chiswick
The Maya at Mérida
I Maya a Mérida
Love Poem
Poesia d’amore
I Have Lost Nothing
Non ho perduto nulla
To Liguria
Alla Liguria
To Keep The World In Balance
Basta un giorno a equilibrare il mondo
I Have Flowers and by Night I Call on the Poplars
Ho fiori e di notte invito i pioppi

Available:

The Writers Group
6A Hastings Rd
Mairangi Bay
North Shore City 0630
Auckland
jack.ross@xtra.co.nz

Reviews & Comments:

C. K. Stead. "I know what I’ll be reading this summer." Sunday Star-Times (5/12/04): C8.

For poetry I have the new Ken Smithyman, Campana to Montale, Versions from the Italian, just published in a very nice edition by The Writer’s Group (6A Hastings Road, Mairangi Bay, Auckland 1311).

Raewyn Alexander. New Zealand Poetry Society Newsletter (February 2005) 4-5.

How lovely to decide to understand another country’s poetry whether you know their language or not. Just as a person may step off a plane or boat abroad into unknown territory, Smithyman explored parallel realities on a page. Perhaps through each line, as one of Salvatore Quasimodo’s poems states so eloquently ‘...we seek a sign that will curve over life...’

Bernard Gadd. Spin 49 (2005) 77-78.

I’m hoping that this collection will revive kiwi poets’ interest in how fascinating, how sensuous, how deeply felt, how thoughtful poetry can be and how it can so satisfyingly combine the intensely personal with the world of people, creatures, forces beyond the individual.

Paula Green. brief 32 (2005) 108-12.

Smithyman moves across (trans) the Great Divide from the sides (lati) of Italian (well, English versions) to the sides of English, inserting his own signature and his personal ornaments, yet somehow his performance is animated by a strong allegiance to the original, not at all pious but certainly loyal. Smithyman’s versions represent a tender conversation with the Italian poems; like the iconic sunflower, Smithyman’s conversation is flawed yet, more significantly, is vital and transporting.

Joe Wyllie. Takahe 55 (2005): 60.
With his formidable literary and language skills Jack Ross appears to have done a superb job of bringing this, supposedly the last of Smithyman’s posthumous works, to publication. For anyone with an interest in language, Campana to Montale is a goldmine, as much, perhaps, for Ross’s contribution as for Smithyman’s.

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