Laura Williamson
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Book review: Takahē – Bird of Dreams
By Alison Balance (Potton & Burton, 2023) I don’t want to stir up any more Bird of the Century controversy, but takahē are the best. For one, they are crazy-pretty. The takahē’s plumage, with its layers of blue, turquoise and shimmering green, is everything you need to know about how nature makes perfect beauty. Also,
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Poetry review: Remember Me – Poems to Learn by Heart from Aotearoa New Zealand
Edited by Anne Kennedy (Auckland University Press, 2023) Poetry is written as much for the ear as for the eye, and the more than 200 poems anthologised in Remember Me were chosen with this in mind. As editor Anne Kennedy explains in her introduction, these are works which “employ a kind of music to convey
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Elsie’s Dream
A winning story. This year, the Queenstown Writers Festival team held a mini festival featuring author talks workshops, as well as, for the first time, a writing contest. The Anna-Marie Chin Writing Competition saw writers from Otago and Southland given a range of prompts and 48 hours to write an original response, either fiction or
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For the record
What’s an international music writer like Fraser Lewry doing in a place like Ōamaru? Writing about music, mostly. Peer through the window at the Business Hive coworking space on Ōamaru’s Thames Street on any given day, and you’ll likely see a kind-looking, bespectacled guy in a band tee-shirt (Canadian rock’n’roll revivalists The Sheepdogs, say, or
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Green Mind
A grassroots history of sowing and mowing in Aotearoa. I left Wānaka in my little white Toyota campervan, bound for the North Island. The trip was equal parts long and tedious, novel and exciting. There were windy sections and straight sections, narrow mountain passes and expansive valley floors. As I drove and drove across our
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Book Review: A River Runs
By Benny Sip Fishing and poetry – it’s a 1964 dream combo! Benny Sip’s spare collection A River Runs is named, presumably, for American author Norman Maclean’s classic novella A River Runs Through It, which tapped into a youth spent in Montana surrounded by family for whom there was “no clear line between religion and
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The festival season is upon us
The 1964 guide to the best music festies of the South Island. Down here in the roaring forties, summer comes with the kind of long days and warm nights that lend themselves to the wearing of small amounts of clothing and to dancing in fields until the sun goes down, and then comes up all
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Book review: The South Island of New Zealand: From the Road
By Robin Morrison (Massey University Press, 2023) First published in 1981, The South Island of New Zealand: From the Road was the result of a road trip taken by the late photographer Robin Morrison and his family in 1979. While travelling through the South Island, Robin chose to take pictures of places and people, instead
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Book review: BITER
by Claudia Jardine (Auckland University Press, 2022) Claudia Jardine is a bit of a polymath. She has an MA in classics from Victoria University of Wellington, is the reigning Christchurch Poetry Slam Champion, and is an independent musician. She is also very funny. BITER, her debut poetry collection, reflects all of the above. The book