Auckland University Press: 301 books

The poems in Today is the Piano's Birthday are spare, imagistic and suggestive. They cover a range of tones and subjects, moving from love lyrics to a focus on insanity, death and despair. A poem, Michael Harlow says, is: 'a construct of language and space, so that one word discovers another, one...

Winner, 2012 NZSA Jessie Mackay Award for the Best First Book of Poetry Sometimes amusing, sometimes sobering, this compilation by judge John Adams is a melange of poems—in traditional and experimental forms—and other texts, which include affidavits, police reports, a sudoku puzzle, court...

The verse of Latin poet Catullus is reinterpreted for the modern world in this collection of poetry that incorporates classical ideas through domestic and maternal themes. With wit, originality, and tenderness, famous poetry from Catullus is adapted to the playground, the home, and the family to capture...

From Owls do Cry to The Carpathians, the novels of Janet Frame have challenged our understanding of what fiction does. In The Frame Function, Jan Cronin traces the operation of a prescriptive authorial presence within the novels to offer an engaging ‘inside–out' guide to a great writer's work....

Vivid sketches full of unexpected detail communicate bizarre, humorous, and magical cultural clashes in this first collection from a rising poet who draws from her personal experiences as the child of an immigrant. A woman stranded at home with small children listens to the radio for company in wry,...

Drawing upon more than 80 personal diaries and journals of those on board, this resource explores the rich experience and the trials and tribulations of hopeful Anglo-Celtic pilgrims headed to Australia and New Zealand aboard migrant ships in the late 19th century. From daily routines to matters of...

Imaginative and cerebral, this volume recounts the fantastic history of the antipodes—namely Australia and New Zealand—from the Western perspective over the course of the past five millennia. Tracing the fiction underlying the fact in the tales of, among others, Marco Polo, John Mandeville, and...

For more than three years, poet and artist Gregory O'Brien followed the migratory routes of whales and seabirds across vast tracts of the South Pacific Ocean, resulting in a collection of poems that stand as a homage to a series of remarkable locations and the natural histories of those places. In...

This classic study of indigenous Polynesian music, conducted in the 1960s, includes a survey of traditional songs in different styles that embody the fundamental values of Maori culture in New Zealand. Musical transcriptions, Maori texts, English translations, and extensive notes on more than 50 traditional...

This account of an ethnomusicologist's experience conducting fieldwork offers a glimpse into the life of New Zealand's Maori people through his documentation of traditional songs. The audio recordings included span 1958 through 1979, a time when many of the culture's traditions were fading. Sensitive...

In 1955 the United States-owned ship Joyita mysteriously disappeared while sailing between Apia, Samoa, and Tokelau in the Pacific Ocean. The ship was discovered in poor condition near Fiji five weeks later, but no trace has ever been found of the 25 crew and passengers who had been aboard. This is...

An accomplished collection of poems, A Pattern of Marching brings us messages of cool precision and accuracy from Elizabeth Smither. Restrained elegance, fine craft and wit characterise the verses. This is, in the words of the last line of the title poem, 'A skilled performance anyone could share'.

For more than five decades, gangs have played a pivotal role in New Zealand crime life, beginning with the bodgies and widgies of the 1950s. Based on 10 years of gang research, this book chronicles the rise of the Hell's Angels and other bike gangs in the 1960s, the growth of the Mongrel Mob and Black...

This revised edition of a classic introduction to the New Zealand political, constitutional, and electoral system covers recent elections and the constitutional and legal changes that have attracted the attention of the international community. Using a pluralist theory of the state, it describes the...