Auckland University Press imprint: 301 books

Toys are fun—but they are also serious business, as David Veart makes clear in this remarkable story of New Zealanders and their toys from Maori voyagers to 21st-century gamers. Deploying the tools of archaeology and oral history, Veart digs through a few centuries of pocket knives and plasticine...

Mister Hamilton, John Dickson's first collection in eighteen years, is an appealing, questioning mix of elements. Over a base of South Island bedrock (granite, schist, greywacke), Dickson has peopled this quietly fiery collection with day-to-day working voices and narratives, sometimes comic, sometimes...

Offering poems that draw vividly on the landscape, history, and mythology of Ireland-while making connections with her home and childhood-this collection of poems reflects the author's personal journey and the many "invasions" of past and present. She adapts and transforms several ancient Irish texts, rewriting their stories for a contemporary world. 

An enchanting collection by a new young poet, this includes six playful, warm and allusive sequences, literary variations on domestic life, domestic takes on literature.

This dynamic poetry collection combines punchy political and social awareness with tender observations of everyday life. Embracing a wide variety of subjects, these poems constantly shift in tone and rhythm, ranging from hard-hitting "rants" on the South Pacific, the media, big business,...

This engaging collection of poetry, split into six sections and written in an intimate and affectionate tone, is wonderfully diverse. The lyrical poems address issues that run the gamut from family, friends, and domestic situations; to children’s perception of the world; the seashore; and political...

In Elizabeth Smither's eighteenth collection of poetry her words are as vital as ever. The poems take the everyday – mothers and daughters, cats and horses, books and bowls, slippers and shirts – and transform them into something fresh: sometimes surreal, sometimes funny, often enchanted. And...

Including 50 poems by revered New Zealand poet and social activist James K. Baxter, this unique and accessibly sized collection offers an insider's view of the man and his work from his longtime friend and fellow poet Sam Hunt. With a range of familiar and lesser-known poems dating from 1945 to 1972,...

The poems in this extraordinary full-length collection ask you to force yourself beyond your own boundaries. They are curious, restless, and bold; they marry lyrical music and intricate metaphor as they search for other human voices beyond the rumblings of the apocalypse and the stubbornness of myth....

Jump is the first collection from poet Elizabeth Nannestad, who has also worked as a doctor and forensic psychiatrist. These brief poems come to us in a singular voice, deceptively deft and simple. They are capable of song, wit and mystery. Elizabeth Nannestad writes of these poems: They are all about...

Exciting in its taut energy and inventive comedy, Murray Edmond's The Switch is a long poem in forty-nine parts which proceeds, not in a straight line, but in a dazzling display of repetitions, rearrangements and transformations. It's a game, a show, an entertainment and a meditation about love and the passage of time.

In these 40 powerful new poems, Sarah Broom explores the effect of a life-threatening condition by way of the landscapes of the natural world, charting the hardest things in beautiful language. Broom's forte is in encapsulating, expressing, and making sense of strong internal feeling and turmoil through...

The Pacific Islands began to appear in Western literature soon after European navigators made landfall there. From the first, there was seldom a statement of plain facts. Explorers brought their own viewpoints while editors, poets and novelists went on to interpret and moralise the first accounts....

Maurice Duggan's Collected Stories is a powerful collection of short stories from one of New Zealand's finest writers of the genre. Duggan's lyrical power and exceptional style come to the fore in these brilliant stories, which are tinged with undercurrents and ambivalences. The variety of language...