Victoria University Press: 93 books

The Japanese Military Field Code was explicit: 'Japanese forces do not surrender to the enemy under any circumstances.' How then would the eight hundred or so prisoners who found themselves in the first Japanese prisoner-of-war camp anywhere in the world behave? They had been brought from the Soloman...

The poet’s ongoing love affair with his Central Otago home lies at the heart of this rich and compelling new collection that explores the politics of relationships and relationships themselves. Through a combination of people and place that gives the poems color and humor, the volume also examines...

Building on previous themes and introducing some new techniques, this collection reveals a respected poet at the height of his powers. Here are finely crafted lyrics, found poems, a bracket of songs, and complex emotions-all tempered by the use of humor.

Building on the impressive debut of Good Luck, this new collection from Anna Livesey contains poems that capture the eerie and exhilarating aspects of daily life. All the poems combine a crisp and shapely style with breathtaking openness and urgency in addressing personal material, particularly...

George, 54, cannot understand why his wife left him. She offered him no real explanation and in his terms he has always treated her decently. The play looks at the problems of redundancy and unemployment, and by the end we may more fully understand the wife's decision.

This provocative collection contains pieces both older and previously unpublished from the author's 20 year career*.* Readers will especially value the new material, pulled from his journalistic pieces written during his five-year employment at the Jewish Museum in Berlin. Posthumously published,...

An unusually strong first book, this collection of short stories depends on exquisitely crafted surfaces that conceal shocking emotional force. Three of the stories are obliquely connected and feature young women on the edge. In the first of these, a new mother contemplates her new baby; in the second,...

Taking a dark turn, this important New Zealand poet explores the legacy of a heretic who was burned at the stake in 1310 for writing a thesis called Simple Annihilated Souls. Answering back, modern souls offer their own lamentations in poems such as "The Tired Atheist" and "Driving on the Bypass."

Raymond Thomas Lawrence was one of the great literary colossi to bestride the twentieth century. Seven years after Lawrence’s death, however, the four trustees of the literary trust set up to memorialize New Zealand’s greatest writer are facing rising costs and dwindling visitor numbers at the...

One day in 1955, the “father of New Zealand fiction” finds a young woman on his doorstep. A writer herself, she has recently emerged from a lengthy stay in the hospital for mental health problems and is seeking a safe place to live and write. The woman is Janet Frame, and the man who willingly...

All the time on the island there had been something she was looking for. She knew she had to keep this in mind, and that she'd know what it was when she found it. Whatever it proved to be.It's 1956 and Iola arrives on the island of Ibiza, on the fringes of Franco's Spain, with little more than a Spanish...

Bethell stands with RAK Mason at the beginnings of modern poetry in New Zealand. Born in England, she grew up in New Zealand but did not live there until the 1920's when at the age of fifty she began to write poetry. Her first collection of poems, 'From a Garden in the Antipodes', was published in...

Denis Glover wrote New Zealand's most famous poem, yet his work has been out of print for many years. This fresh selection from his verse includes 'The Magpies' along with a wide variety of other poems, lyrical and satirical. Bill Manhire's selection is based on Glover's own 1981 Selected Poems, and it reveals a richer and far more lively writer than the one usually found in anthologies.

Mason is a legendary name in New Zealand's brief poetic history. He was the first of the few. Now at last, in this collected edition, his work is accessible again, and can be seen as a whole.